Have Millennials Really Been Screwed Over by Baby Boomers?

In the months preceding major elections, it’s not uncommon to hear a familiar question: “Are you better off now than you were four (or eight) years ago?” It’s meant to prompt feelings of discontent toward incumbent political leaders, and to encourage us to vote for the next big personality promising sweeping change.

But the much better question to ask is this: “Is the world better off than it was when you were born?” If the answer is “no,” and you consider yourself an informed and politically conscious adult, you have some explaining to do.

So how about it? Is the world better off than when you were born?

In many, many ways, the answer is a resounding “yes.” If you don’t believe this is the best time to be alive, you’ve probably been living in a shoebox for the last several decades.

And yet, in many other ways, it seems there are forces at work in this world that want to desperately turn back the clock on every scrap of social progress we’ve made over the last generation. Conservatism is not merely the name of a political ethos — it is a way of thinking, and frequently a substitute for rationality, and was brought into this world in its current form by our parents’ and grandparents’ generation. And it now touches every aspect of modern life. Conservatism is not “family values” and it has nothing to do with religion — it is an aversion to progress itself.

This writer is a member of the millennial generation. If our experiences over the years have been anything alike, you’ve had to deal with any number of sweeping judgments — smears, really — not just against you and I, as distinct human beings, but against our entire generation. We’re lazy. We’re uninformed. We have no work ethic. We’re selfish and narcissistic. We expect to succeed without trying.

Let’s be clear: if millennials are to be judged by the actions of the Justin Beavers, the Kim Kardashians or the Martin Shkrelis of the world, then by all means — lock us all up, because we’re all guilty as hell.

But prepare yourself, because by that logic, we’re all holding your generation accountable for the Donald Trumps, the Charles and David Kochs, the Nigel Farages and the Bill O’Reillys gallivanting around the globe spewing lies and fomenting hatred.

Get it? Generalizations cut both ways.

So, as long as we’re discussing the moral high ground here, let’s check in with Good Lady Science for a look at some of the pronouncements frequently leveled against millennials by older generations:

Whereas, under the stewardship of our parents’ and grandparents’ generations, the quality of living in this country has plummeted over the last few decades for everybody but the very wealthy. Our grandparents grew up in a version of the world that allowed them a fleeting glimpse of what it’s like to live prosperous and dignified lives — thanks to a combination of progressive politics and blind luck — and yet they cast shade on younger generations for “not knowing the value of a dollar.”

If they’d received, instead of The New Deal, an earful of “just work harder” while they were growing up amidst unprecedented economic hardship, they’d be just as disenchanted as today’s young people are. Instead, they had the good fortune to grow up in a time when America actually took care of its own, instead of just claiming to do so. But even as government and other institutions grow and change in an attempt to reintroduce equilibrium and lift the standard of living, there are inevitably more conservative forces at work, desperate to return things to a different sort of status quo — one where opportunity and dignity are luxury commodities.

And we’ve always known this. Since time immemorial, philosophers and economists have been doing their sky-is-falling routine about the grotesque level of economic inequality in this world, calling attention to the fact that, in just about every “successful” nation on earth, the bottom 50% of the population has, broadly speaking, owned virtually no stake in their country, and only the tiniest share of their country’s wealth.

Go ahead and ask a Baby Boomer what their generation has done about that problem. You’ll be waiting quite a long time. We’ve not only failed to make progress — we’ve actually turned the clock back, to the point where economic inequality is just as bad — and potentially even worse — now than it was during the Great Depression.

That would be the disaster that most Boomers pat themselves on the back for surviving. The funny thing is, they never mention the extremely progressive (or liberal, if you prefer) President who helped lead this country out of that Depression and laid the foundation for America’s later greatness. They forget that the Social Security checks they rely on in their twilight years were made possible by progressive minds. The politics and priorities of Franklin Delano Roosevelt bear absolutely no resemblance to the political ethos so desperately clung to with blind brand loyalty by today’s Baby Boomers.

We could go on and on like this, poking holes in bankrupt ideologies all day long, but that’s not particularly constructive. We’ve already touched on the economic aspect of this conversation, and because it touches each of the other ones, we can give each of them only a brief mention before moving on:

Healthcare

Lots of folks spend time explaining how human beings are “above the fray” of the animal kingdom — we are special, precious and blessed beings who abide by higher standards. But do we actually behave that way? In the animal kingdom, the weak are subsumed by the strong, merely as a matter of course. The world doesn’t blink. So why don’t we make a fuss when human beings treat each other with coldness or malice?

Universal healthcare should be the crowning achievement of every “civilized” society. It is proof that we care for our own, for no reason other than because we belong to the same species. A great many people who fight tooth and claw against the idea of universal healthcare don’t believe in evolution, yet they’re perfectly content to let survival of the fittest hold sway in our lives. It’s not a new idea: some of the more forward-thinking countries in the world have had some form of universal healthcare for a hundred years already.

Warfare

You’d expect that a generation that grew up in the aftermath of World War II would be a bit more averse to the idea of perpetual warfare.

You’d be wrong.

Young people today are far more likely to oppose armed conflict than the other generations, an attitude perhaps best exemplified by our sweeping denouncement of the use of atomic weapons during the second world war. That act of horror could have galvanized the older generation into turning this country — and in turn the world — into a safer place to raise children, and instead we elect leaders based on how many wars they’ve fought in and how likely they are to aim missiles at other countries. Young people support the recent Iran deal because they recognize the value of diplomacy in a way older folks do not.

Baby Boomers were handed the chance to make this world a more peaceful place. They said “no.”

Social Justice

Finally, briefly, we come to social justice. Pessimism about race relations is worse now than it’s been in a generation, as people seem to believe that things have either failed to improve measurably, or are actually worse than in previous years. We know this because it’s nearly impossible to criticize murderous white police officers without being accused of sedition.

We also know that, as a result of Baby Boomer leadership (or, more accurately, the lack of it), America has a larger population of inmates than any other country on earth, including authoritarian China, which has more than four and a half times as many citizens as the United States.

Under the watch of our grandparents and parents, America has become a more intolerant and hostile place. Crime has actually fallen over the years, make no mistake — but you wouldn’t know it from the way we discuss the problems facing us. And not many millennials I know begin sentences with the phrase “Black people are more likely to…” — and yet it’s a common refrain among older citizens. We’re all one species, with only superficial physical differences. The color of our skin in no way influences what we are “more likely” to do.

Things Are Looking Up

Sorry for the fire and brimstone. The truth is, things are actually looking up, despite the many spectacular failures we’ve discussed during our stroll down memory lane. This really is the best time to grow up, and make no mistake about it.

Essential commodities cost less than they did in decades past (millennials are spending, on average, $12,600 less on their first car than Baby Boomers did), poverty is very (very) gradually dropping, technological innovations arrive faster than ever, life expectancies have hit a new plateau, there’s generally less crime and war in the world, we’re feeding the world’s hungry more effectively, our population growth has slowed and human beings are becoming generally more intelligent and adaptable as each new generation arrives on the scene.

And all that good news much makes this petty blame game feel like a useless exercise. It’s true that older folks seem to cling to some ideal of the world that hasn’t existed in a long while — or never existed in the first place — and it’s true that they seem to demand two steps backward for every forward leap, but the fact remains: the world is moving on, just as it always has. We can look backwards at our failures, or we can spend our time imagining a brighter future than anyone has ever dreamed of…

…and then do the work that makes it possible.

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Holly Whitman is a writer and journalist based in Washington DC. She loves to share her thoughts on the intersection of politics and culture, and writes on everything from feminism and human rights to climate change and technology.

431 Responses

As they say, one of the most important rules of writing is to know your readers. Your entire argument here is predicated on the correctness and moral superiority of your left-wing worldview, and you demonstrate no awareness whatsoever of the existence, much less the content, of any arguments against the highly debatable assumptions you’re making. You’re writing as if you were preaching to the choir, but you’re not. I think this would probably go over well at a site with an overwhelmingly or exclusively left-wing readership, but this is not that site.Report

You know what would happen… re-litigating the entire progressive project from arms control to LGBT rights would turn this thread into something unmanageable.

But Brandon is right – the tl;dr of this is “polls show younger people agree with me more” with very little additional content. A cynic would turn it around and re-phrase this as “I tend to agree with my peers more than my parents’ peers.”Report

If a person of Holly’s age could write such a blatantly blindered piece, I think it is a reasonable assumption she lacks either the aptitude or the desire to absorb and address opposing arguments. I will allow her to decide which it is.

Seriously, this reads like a piece of propaganda for a partisan political party, with everything aimed at rhetoric and persuasion and nothing aimed at understanding or enlightenment for either the author or the reader. It reminds me of a written version of the non-stop stream of partisan political commercials running all day long as the election approaches – chalk full of emotional hot buttons and rhetorical triggers.Report

My guess is it would be as useful to address Holly’s nonstop stream of partisan shots as it would be to yell at the TV set during a political ad.

Neither is in any way intended to inform or enlighten. Just influence, even deceptively if necessary.

Holly wraps herself in a veil which calls itself “progressive”, but everything in her style and rhetoric is the antithesis of the concept. Orwell would be proud.

If she disagrees, she should say so and ask for honest feedback and open up to a dialogue. We could address her narrow concept of conservative, her blatant obfuscation of generation issues with ideology, her misunderstandings of the cause or escape from the Depression, her errors on trends of median well being, her confusion on the multifaceted nature of equality, her ignorance on crime rates by race, the relationship between incarceration and crime rates, or the long term trends in violence and warfare.Report

Is Holly wrong? If so, why? Even if you can’t change her mind, maybe you can change the mind of people who might be convinced by this post?

The assumption seems to be that Holly could have ONLY written this piece if she was “blindered” and “demonstrat[ing] no awareness whatsoever of the existence, much less the content, of any arguments against the highly debatable assumptions [she’s] making.” But maybe she actually fairly considered all of those arguments and STILL reached the conclusions she did.

It seems like your collective response is, “Someone wrote a really opinionated piece that I completely disagree with so I won’t engage with it.” Is that really the ground your staking out?Report

I respect your opinion and would gladly discuss any of the subtopics that I laid out (immediately above) with YOU, or with of course Holly if she was actually interested in a dialogue. I will let her respond if she is interested. Otherwise I will assume I am just talking to a political ad.

So are you interested in discussing any of the issues of disagreement I pointed in my final paragraph above? There are quite a few (and I only listed out the major ones) so it may be best to narrow it to an area of interest to you.Report

I’m not particularly interested in the argument Holly put forth one way or another because I don’t see much value in saying one group simply has better ideas than another. So if the argument is, “Which group has better ideas (and, therefore, isbetter): Millennials or Boomers?” I would likely quietly bow out of the conversation. Just not my cup of tea. And that is even assuming we have an accurate representation of the two groups in question, which I tend to reflexively assume we don’t regardless of who is making the argument.

So… if the question is: “Is Holly right or wrong?” I respectfully abstain.

Now, if the question is: What is the preferable position on Topic X? I find that a much more interesting conversation.

But as I see it, Holly wrote a piece in which she essentially said, “Millennials have it right and Boomers had/have it wrong.” And you, LTL, and BB seem to have responded by saying, “You don’t understand the Boomers and/or conservatism and took a myopic, self-serving view in your analysis.” I can’t say if Holly is right. I can’t say if you/LTL/BB are right. I simply don’t know enough about the topics at hand to weigh in.

But I guess what I struggled with was the notion that arguments like Holly should be reserved for preaching to the choir. I generally find preaching to choirs to be of minimal value and the sort of thing that limits understanding and curtails constructive dialogue. So to encourage her to do that felt… wrong. Holly is offering her (very likely ideologically-informed) analysis to a rather ideologically diverse audience in which people can disagree, pick it apart, submit counter-arguments, challenge her assumptions, and refute her arguments. To me, that seems like a very good thing… even if (perhaps because!) she is very wrong.

I’m not saying you have to engage with her. I guess I’d just rather see a response like, “You are wrong and biased and here is why…” than “You are wrong and biased and should just go talk to other people who are similarly wrong and biased so you can be wrong and biased together.”

Does that make sense? I’m not defending Holly’s arguments as much as I’m defending Holly making those arguments in a space like this to an audience like this. I think Holly getting challenged (as she is by many people down thread) is a much better process than Holly talking to other likeminded individuals in one echo chamber and another echo chamber emerging wherein it is discussed how wrong Holly is.

I fully understand and appreciate how conservatives can be made to feel on their heels here. While we aim for ideological diversity — and I think achieve it better than just about any site out there — we do have the ways in which we lean and we aren’t always welcoming to conservative viewpoints. So I get Brandon’s initial response to a piece like the one Holly submitted. But then when invited… encouraged!… to offer a different viewpoint, I’m not sure I understood the response from there.Report

I never accused her of being too young, I never asked her to shut up, I specifically laid out the areas of disagreement to Kazzy and I ENCOURAGED engagement if she or anyone else is interested. Yes, I suspect she isn’t interested. But I could be wrong.Report

I suspect, and I have absolutely no idea where I get this idea, that if she wants to discuss certain topics, they’re healthcare, warfare, and social justice.

Feel free to talk about whatever you want (heck, I am below), but not sure why she has to talk about your partially-overlapping list to have a “serious discussion.” That said, if you want to talk about something, talk about it. The only thing you’ve said this whole thread is that you don’t like the author’s politics. Which is nice for you, I guess, but otherwise matters little without showing your work.

Also, though I would wish it otherwise, post authors don’t have to engage in the comments on this site at all.Report

The central argument here is that the current days are much improved from times past. Healthcare, warfare, and social justice are examples cited in support, as distinct form the support itself.

There are a number of underlying assumptions, not the least of which is that optimal conduct from limited information may be adequately assessed from a position of more comprehensive information while disregarding the limitations on information at both points.

Frankly, that is one thing that I learned from parenting– to forgive my own parents their shortcomings. They were much younger than my own memory gives them credit for, and they were doing the best they could as they tried to figure things out while making their way. That is, I learned to forgive. From there, I learned to reserve judgment. It is that same tendency that gives me hesitation in condemning the piece.

There are general tendencies that are shown in generations. The big one that separates the Boomers is lack of valuation of work/life balance, while subsequent generations tend to value this progressively greater.

The piece suffers from hyperbole and peevishness, and would be stronger without those elements. My 2¢.Report

If Holly is interested in any serious discussion, then she can say so, and I will engage her.

Would she like to discuss: 1). The nature of conservative ideology? 2). The nature and methodology of progress? 3). The causes of the Great Depression? 4). The complex nature of equality (beyond simple notions of equality of outcome regardless of contribution) 5). The relationship between incarceration and crime? 6). Racial disparities in murder or violent crime? 7). Median well being trends over the past generation? 8). Long term trends of violence and warfare? 9). The differences between generations and ideology and the obfuscation that results from mixing the two? 10). The scale and explanations for improvement in human prosperity and flourishing over the past two hundred years (which she actually underestimates)?

I am assuming she is not really interested in a dialogue on any of these. This assumption comes from the way the article was written. Her rhetoric showed all the nuance of partisan speaking points, and no sign of any understanding of any of the above topics or contradictory views.

She doesn’t make much of an effort to prove that Millennials are right – it’s an “arc of history” argument in which generational differences are ipso facto decided in the favor of the newest idea. I don’t even think she’s wrong on the benefits of universal healthcare and reducing incarceration. She just failed to make the case.

When it comes to specific issues, the author is very light on specifics and heavy on assumptions. Universal healthcare, we are told, “should be the crowning achievement of every ‘civilized’ society.” by her own say-so. “Forward thinking” countries have universal healthcare. They’re forward thinking because they have universal healthcare. The fact that ACA was passed by a boomer President and a mostly boomer Congress is immaterial.

As for the atomic bomb, the fact that millennials are more opposed than boomers doesn’t do work the author says it does. “Group opposes war-related thing” and “group is more in favor of peace” are not the same. Perhaps boomers, who spent more time with the WWII generation, understand the necessity of using the bomb in a way the Millennials don’t. Perhaps boomers saw, over the course of many Cold War conflicts, that using the bomb once to end a war contributed to the fact that it hasn’t been used to start one.

The presence of more misery p*rn on your Facebook feed doesn’t mean that the world is getting more dangerous. It just means that open wounds and dirty, crying children are as still effective clickbait. I would argue that the management of the end of the Soviet Union, the re-unification of Germany and the destabilization of puppet states worldwide could have been handled much, much worse.

In the social justice section, we see more lack of historical perspective. The author may not have been around when there was a murder in New York every six hours. The Bronx was not burning in most Millennials’ lifetime. Mass incarceration isn’t cheap, it wasn’t done for sh*ts and giggles. Things were very, very bad and people had good reasons to believe that it would help.

Besides, it’s not like Millennials have a more coherent view on the issue either. The “non-violent drug offender” mantra is low-hanging fruit and accounts for a small percentage of the prison population. Millennials can talk about rehabilitation until their faces turn blue, but the second you get a rapist or a hate crime in the mix, they’re baying for blood like it’s mid-day on AM talk radio.

All that taken into account, the millennials v boomers conflict misses the point. Any positive social change that happens now does so within the framework of boomer-dominated leadership of most institutions (except for the mostly pre-boomer SCOTUS) and most of the bad things that happened when boomers were growing up (when things were supposedly getting screwed up for millennials) were done by their parents’ generation.

What we’re left with then is a “turnabout is fair play” appeal to stereotypes of varying levels of accuracy.Report

Sort of? The problem is that there’s really no argument to rebut. Her whole argument, as @ltl-ftc points out, is that millennials are great because they tend to agree with her. I’m not a big fan of generational wars, and I’m a borderline millennial myself, but it’s kind of funny how much that plays into the stereotype.

Anyway, she’s not actually making an argument for any of the things in here that I object to; she’s just throwing them out there as if it were obvious that any reasonable person would agree that those are obviously points in millennials’ favor. And there are so many that I don’t know where to start. If she had written a piece trying to make the case for one or two of those points, that would be a good starting-point for a discussion, but as it is, I don’t know what to say, other than what I said.

There’s also the fact that she doesn’t really have a record of meaningful engagement with commenters on this site. I’m not complaining, especially since I’m not so great with follow-through myself, but there doesn’t seem to be much point in putting a lot of work into a response to someone who’s not likely to reciprocate.Report

And yet, in many other ways, it seems there are forces at work in this world that want to desperately turn back the clock on every scrap of social progress we’ve made over the last generation. Conservatism is not merely the name of a political ethos — it is a way of thinking, and frequently a substitute for rationality, and was brought into this world in its current form by our parents’ and grandparents’ generation. And it now touches every aspect of modern life. Conservatism is not “family values” and it has nothing to do with religion — it is an aversion to progress itself.

C’mon, this is just being abusive

And poverty eradication? Its only gradual if you don’t look beyond your own borders. The drastic reduction in poverty in east and southeast asia brought about by boomer generation policies. Major contributions for that include free trade agreements as well as international institutions like the world bank and the IMF. We also shouldn’t underestimate the role the vietnam war played in buying time for a number of countries south of indochina to rid themselves of communist threats. If the vietnam war hadn’t been fought, places like Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines would be a lot like Venezuela now. To the extent that China’s opening up its market was a reaction to and imitation of the success of Hong kong and Singapore, then China would still be a gigantic maoist hell hole. So, there has been far more progress on a number of fronts that you understate.

Race relations seem particularly bad now, but that is only because you are unaware of how bad it was before twitter. In all probability the only difference between now and 10 years ago is that 10 years ago white people didn’t know how badly blacks were being treated by the cops. And surely the falling crime rate can be owed to something the boomers did right (perhaps roe vs wade?) even if not their crime policy exactly. But social justice is more than just race. Comparing the debate on immigration now to where it was 10 years ago, a lot more people are open to free-er migration and the acceptance of refugees. On LGBTQ issues, we are so far away from where we were 10, let alone 20 years ago that saying we are worse off on the social justice dimension is astounding. And surely some of this progress is attributable to boomers. After all, boomer activists, CEOs, and yes, politicians have been the ones to allow gay partners to enjoy spousal benefits in the companies, enacted the judicial changes the legalised SSM and fought for those changes and set up a welcoming environment for LGBT teens newly out of the closet.Report

“hey, how did this place get to be such an echo chamber all of a sudden? I mean, we were utter shits to all those nasty racists who didn’t deserve to post here; where are all the wonderful enlightened people who’d been getting suppressed by their bad attitudes?”Report

So yeah, a vast majority of republicans are willing to vote for amoral authoritarian pu$$y snacher. Owning thats got to hurt the chances that non-trump forces move their dumpster fire, or even figure out how to stop tossing more gas on it.

This is the best part of trump. You never have to take moral pronouncements from the “moral majority/ religious right” seriously again. They all felt okay letting trump into bed, like they’ve never been lied to before. Y’all slept with the devil y’allneed jesus. Or thor. Or gaia. Something anyway.Report

I’ve read The Fountainhead all the way through, which is penance enough for one lifetime. I’ve not read much of Atlas Shrugged: the scene where many innocents suffocate in the train tunnel, except that they’re not innocents because every one of them has done things Objectivists consider evil (e.g. take out a small business loan), is plenty.Report

I came close to reading one of Rand’s books. I’d been out of college a few years and wanted something Good to read. It was either going to be Tender is the Night by good ol F Scott or one of the two big Rand books. I’d heard Rand was Important and Worthwhile. So i went to the bookstore picked up each one and read a couple pages at random from the middle. You have one guess which book i picked just based on the beauty and craft of writing.

I’ve read a number of the more … dubious examples by proxy, through blog deconstructions. “Left Behind” and its ilk, “Atlas Shrugged”, “Fifty Shades” et seq., and Narnia are all active examples, either live or through reposts, from various sources.Report

His numbers have taken a hardive but mainly among independents. He has been largely abandoned by enough Republican leaning women to put normally red states like Arizona into play. From what it seems the #nevertrumpers were right. Trump is driving enough blacks and Hispanics into the Democratic Party to give HRC a solid edge in many states.

The demographic maps are still real though. The Democratic Party is a true coalition of minorities and just enough white voters. Trump would still win if only whites voted and even if only white women voted.

He can still theoretically win but most of the debate is now will HRC have a narrow victory, an Obama victory, or an even more dramatic landslide.

All the atoms in my body can *theoretically* quantum tunnel two inches to the left and reassemble me there, too. But I have to say that’s probably not going to happen.

A while back, when we were predicting Clinton vs. Trump, I predicted we’d probably get Clinton winning by Obama amounts, or Trump would do something stupid and his loss would be a blowout.

Man, I feel stupid for hedging now. I really should have assumed that Trump would do repeated stupid things.

The only people ‘debating’ are people that exist to provide airtime on TV. Clinton is already at ‘dramatic landslide’, and, for some reason, the massive amounts of early voting this election (Which is something that seems like it need some stories trying to explain them, but I haven’t seen them.) means she’s…probably already won, functionally.

The only actual interesting question left for the nation are ‘What will this do with Congress?’. And people in various states, like me in Georgia, have the interesting question of what our state will do.Report

Concurred. The reason I say he could theoretically still win is because I have an irrational fear of being over-confident.

I think the Democratic Party is going to have a Senate majority. Somewhere along the lines of 52-54. The Democrats will gain seats in Illinois, Pennsylvania, NH, and Wisconsin. Indiana and Missouri look likely to flip as well. I suspect Nevada will stay Democratic for the Reid’s seat. Rubio is likely to win releection according to 538 but I suspect a strong showing for HRC in that state can help Murphy. Same with North Carolina.

The House is harder to predict. The Democrats need to gain 30 seats to have a majority and gerrymandering makes this hard. But if HRC has a landslide victory, all bets are off.Report

1. Most people, whether on the left or right substitute some way of thinking for rational thought. Rational thought is in fact incredibly hard and most people who think they are thinking rationally are in fact not. To single out conservatives here is abusive in that it implies that their opponents are better. They just happen to be lucky. It just turns out that this time, the way of thinking that progressives substitute for rational deliberation did not land them up with some left wing version of trump.

2. While Trump is in not really incidental to the current conservative movement (Tod has adequately detailed how Trump or someone very much like him would have arisen sooner or later in the movement), he is in a sense incidental to conservatism itself. We can imagine conservatism (i.e. three legged stool stuff) without it being beholden to talk radio and fox news and hence not being vulnerable to the reality show antics that produced Trump. Its hard to see that paragraph or for that matter the post being sensitive to this kind of counterfactual. i.e. Given the rest of the post, Holly would have written it even if the Donald and the alt-right didn’t exist. In that case, this is aimed at conservatism generally and not any particular phenomenon that is a product of its current instantiation. We would be having this conversation even if Paul Ryan or Marco Rubio was the nominee. You can’t go from Trump to therefore conservatism is a mental defect.

3. Also, it is abusive because it is gratuitous. We can talk about how we’ve progressed and whether boomers have screwed us over without taking pot shots at conservatives, accurate or otherwise. There is a significant consensus in this site about LGBT issues, race issues, foreign policy issues, even regarding incarceration. There is some disagreement about healthcare and other economic issues but reasonable discussion can be had about those. Meaning there is substantive common ground to work from. to explore the issue. The shot at conservatives was unnecessary

4. Such pot shots are not how you go about doing things if you want peaceful political transitions amidst immense political disagreement. There is also something untoward about demoting all your political opponents from epistemic peerhoood merely because you happen to disagree with them. By implying that conservative thought patterns are anti-reliable she sets it up so that she doesn’t need to listen to them. Sam Wilkinson does a very similar thing when he writes as if conservatism is a thoroughly nefarious movement. There is a kind of failure to afford recognition respect to other co-citizens.Report

We can imagine conservatism (i.e. three legged stool stuff) without it being beholden to talk radio and fox news and hence not being vulnerable to the reality show antics that produced Trump.

We can, and in such an imaginary world, we can further imagine (though I’m unsure why we would) that Ms. Whitman’s argument might have only differed in a few superficial details. However, if we proceed to consider this hypothetical scenario, there would be a pretty devastating counter-argument that is not available here on Earth A: Trump offered conservatives that, and they sent him packing.

As for this reality, those “three-legged stool” conservatives, including ones who now have abjured the Donald and all his works, spent two decades and more reaping the benefits of Fox News and talk radio, in terms of votes, funding and activist energy for their preferred policies. Many of them have stuck with Trump even as they publicly wring their hands over his awfulness because they need him to make those crucial cuts to marginal tax rates, or appoint a fifth vote to overturn Roe to the Supreme Court, or some other policy goal that I’m sure is vitally important.

Thus, the left is burdened with the responsibility of keeping democracy running not just by, you know, voting and adhering to the results of the vote, but also by granting forgiveness in the absence of penitence, and adhering to terms of surrender when no surrender has been offered. After all, just because the structure of our political coalition, and the values that animate it, preclude making Donald Trump our standard bearer, maybe we can imagine a world where they didn’t? And aren’t imaginary failures just as bad as real ones?Report

I don’t think Singapore can be compared economically to the other countries you mentioned. The Phillipines is poor enough that a good chunk of their GDP comes from remittances. College educated Filipinos still make more abroad as nannies and home health aides than in their native country.

Not to mention they are horrifying the world right now with extra-judicial killings of drug addicts.

Malaysia has actually been doing really well economically. In terms of GDP per capita, they’ve caught up with Greece and are closing in on Portugal. Granted, that’s not a particularly high bar, but Malaysia has been growing much faster than those countries, and it’s always a great thing when a poor country joins the first-world club.Report

I really don’t understand what you’re trying to say Holly. First, you’re argument about “are you better off in the last 4 years” is a perfectly legit question-most folks vote close to their pocket books.

Then you segue into whether the “world” better off from when you were born, and you spend the rest of the time talking about how much better off the First World is. That’s actually a debatable point, one that I don’t want to get into, because I think there’s a better comment to make. So let me address that, from the spirit of ” If the answer is “no,” and you consider yourself an informed and politically conscious adult, you have some explaining to do.”

Since there are so many possible ways to view your question, I’ll just answer it from the perspective of the 2nd and 3rd world. The rest of the world lives in poverty…still. Wars and civil strife, diseases, you name it, all continue apace. Acts justified by religion, corruption, power, all continue: Millions of people have been killed by their gov’ts in my lifetime-in Asia and the Middle East, . The US has directly contributed to the killing of tens of thousands of Iraqi children. Acts of genocide have been attempted (Rwanda, Kosovo). Gov’ts have intentionally starved their own populations. Any marginal improvement in these people’s lives really hasn’t been significant on the scale of the time duration under review. The daily life of these people is pretty much the same as it has been.

But I do take heart in Reader’s Digest link you provided, which claims that global warming isn’t making hurricanes worse. Good to know.Report

Just about every charge described in this article as being leveled at Millennials, I remember being leveled at Gen X (my generation) some 15-20 years ago. We’re demographically weak (the smallest demographic cohort since the turn of the 20th century, I think), so no one pays attention to us any more, other than a few folks who apparently think we’re gonna be willing to sacrifice more for the sake of saving the economy and Social Security….

I’ll also note we’ll probably NEVER get a Gen-X president; the “main” choices right now are both Boomers. Not that I think a Gen-X president would be any better of a choice given the way politics goes, it seems to select for a certain type of person….

And I will note: this MAY be the best time to be alive, but it’s damned far from Prof. Pangloss’ “Best of all possible worlds.” I am happy vaccines and good water hygiene and antibiotics exist, but there is still a ton of stuff wrong with the world, a lot of it having to do with how people treat each other. Though I doubt that will EVER get better, looking at the history I’ve read.Report

Coupland didn’t coin the term Gen X , however, he did popularize it. As far as the range of dates for Gen X it seems to be anywhere from 1960-1984 depending on who is counting. The most conservative range is from 1965-1976.Report

President Obama, like myself, was by most accounts of these sorts of things born right on the tail end the boomer generation.

TBH, I’ve always found these generational monikers arbitrary and confusing. People are born every day and the demographic stats are continuous rather than discreet functions.

That said, there are certain experiential markers which seem significant. For instance, as a child in the sixties I grew up with Walter Cronkite reporting the casualties in Vietnam on the nightly news. As a teenager in the seventies my political awareness was shaped in large part by the Watergate scandal, news reports showing Angelenos wearing face masks against the smog, the OPEC driven gas prices, and double-digit mortgage interest rates. Anecdotally, I find that many of my school friends from then, many of whom I would have expected to be conservative by disposition, actually ended up pretty close to my politics; a vague mixture of liberal tending toward libertarian.

They are somewhat arbitrary and confusing, but there are only so many areas where we are allowed to generalize about the intangible traits of people who share a handful of measurable traits and “birth year” is one of the safest.

People who remember Kennedy’s assassination. People who remember the Vietnam body counts on the nightly news. People who remember Columbia blowing up. People who remember the Berlin Wall falling. People who remember 9/11.

There are also cultural ones but these get smooshed across generations because of reruns and Saturday television. (How many generations grew up with the Three Stooges? Looney Toons? Scooby Doo? Happy Days/Laverne and Shirley? The Smurfs?)Report

I’m just weird anyway because my family is demographically weird. I had people of one grandmother’s generation (a great-uncle I never met) who fought in WWI. My parents are “Silent Generation” (born just before WWII) and in some ways my attitudes are more like theirs than they are of my fellow Xers or even the Boomers.

Also, I’m older than most “Xers” so I remember a world without home computers, without phone answering machines, and my family didn’t have cable until I was in college.

I tend to be far more “you kids get off my lawn” than many of my generation. In some ways, I think I was born old and cranky.Report

I hear ya about the demographic weirdness. I’m the youngest of five and my oldest sib is 16 years my senior. She had her first child, my oldest niece, when I was five. I started my family relatively late in life and my youngest was born when I was 42. So there’s a 38 year difference between the oldest and youngest of that batch of cousins.Report

Note: not merely pedantic, but somewhat relevant… The Columbia blew up in 2003. The Challenger blew up in 1986. On a morning when I was going to give a presentation in my sophomore communications class, and had dropped by Safeway to pick up a videotape as required to film the presentation, and saw the news on their wall of TVs (pretty damn fresh, too, since it was a morning class, and it happened at 8:30 Pacific). Note: in 1986, Safeway “super stores” sold videotapes. And TVs.

I’m firmly Gen X.

I’ve always dated the end of the Boom musically, either (early) when the British came back for best-out-of-three or (late) when Hendrix died and we were all condemned to another decade of insipid folk-inspired crap (on the bright side, I didn’t have to deal with that decade as it happened, it just confused the hell out of me when I went to used-record stores).Report

Actually, I had kinda forgotten Columbia. Challenger was literally a kind of 9/11 moment for me, whereas Columbia I mostly remember for the Fridge Horror of the investigation aftermath. Call it even.Report

The baby boom lasted between 1945 and 1964 but your experience as a baby boomer differed dramatically depending on your date of birth. My parents were born in 46 and 47. That makes them true boomers in many way. The type of person whose life was marked by suburbimzation, the Beatles, Civil Rights, Vietnam, and the Countet Culture. It all ended with Watergate and Nixon’s fall.

People born during the early 1960s experienced all of the classic boomer events as children if they experienced them at all. They were in their teens and twenties during the 1970s and 1980s. Their young adulthood was entirely different in its milestones.Report

Ha! I was born in 78 also, but consider myself a Millennial both because I *do* have younger brothers, and because I was doing computers way earlier than any of my peers (Let’s just say I remember being excited for Windows 3.1), and because it took a rather long time to get through college due to random circumstances and starting and stopping. I was graduating with people who were three and four years younger than me.

Oh, and also I was completely disconnected from Gen X culture in high school, due to, frankly, not really many friends, and by the time I actually started interacting with people, it was at college, with people a few years younger than me.

And even now, currently, the place I *actually* interact with people (I work at home for a small company.) is the theatre I volunteer at, or people I met via there , and that is absurdly full of two types of people…retired people, and high school and college students, or people who were very recently college students.

I mean, I know I’m at least a decade older than they are, but I identify with them more than the 70 year old people.Report

Okay, granted. Though in some less-developed nations people are making strides towards increasing it. And healthcare is better, provided people don’t choose to reject it. (Don’t get me started on anti-vaxxers).

I have a parent who grew up without running water and so indoor plumbing is on the top of my list of “things I’m grateful I have”Report

filly, I went to one of the few streams in the Western Hemisphere where you can drink out of it without treating it. (Nearly fell over when the guides said “you can have a drink” — they have it tested)Report

Not a small dog, about an 80lb dog. He became…symptomatic..at night, In the kitchen. The resultant mess was the most horrifying thing I have ever seen in my life.

On the bright side, easily treatable and kind of hilarious to watch as they rehydrated him. They dumped a bunch of liquids into him, but in this weird way that kinda put all the fluid into the loose area between skin and muscle on his neck (you know, that scruff area). So the dog had a football sized mass just kind of wandering around his neck over the next few hours. Didn’t seem to bother him. He just slept.Report

Though I doubt there will be any late Generation Xers like myself who become President. People born between 78-80 are just ignored. We were too young when people originally wrote about Gen X and too old by the time society began paying attention to Millennials.Report

Universal healthcare should be the crowning achievement of every “civilized” society.

If I have a gun and point it at someone and order them to give me money or else, I’m a barbarian. If I have a gun and point it at a doctor and order them to give me healthcare or else, I’m a barbarian. If I have a gun and point it at someone and order them to give me money or else, then I give that money to a doctor and tell them to provide healthcare or else, I’m civilized.Report

I don’t get what it is about a public option that leftists find so entrancing. I have two hypotheses:

1. You think government is magic and can deliver health insurance more cheaply than private insurers can.

2. You know full well that it can’t, but are actually calling for a tax-subsidized public option, which will drive the unsubsidized private options out of business, eventually leading to fully socialized health care.Report

“Since Congress approved the program, proposed by Bush, Democrats have groused that it was a huge giveaway for the pharmaceutical industry because it did not allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices. Obama vowed to change the program to allow Medicare negotiate lower prices. But he backed away from the pledge during negotiations over his health care reform bill, and no provision on negotiating drug prices was included in the bill that became law in 2010.”Report

1. You think government is magic and can deliver health insurance more cheaply than private insurers can.

Weird how apparently magic works in most first world countries then.

Oh well, Kim’s certainly right — I guess economies of scale, bulk bargaining power, and of course the absence of a profit motive and surprisingly low overhead must be magic to you.

Which is weird, given we handle healthcare for the sickest and oldest risk pool in America that way. They’re quite pricey, those folks. I understand the overhead is remarkably low — none of that “only 20% medical-loss-ratio” — It’s like what, 4%?Report

(disclosure: I probably don’t count as a “leftist”) I admit, I support something like a public option, but see how it might go wrong:

1. Doctor’s might not accept patients who carry it and requiring doctors to accept them might not be as easy as simply passing a law, or it might create some big problems for medical providers.

2. It might set a “lowest minimum price” in which the lowest minimum price is actually quite high. In short, it could be a boon to insurers and not the check that some imagine it to be.

Here’s what I’d like it to do, if wishes were fishes, etc.:

1. Offer an insurance that anyone could get and pay for based on a sliding scale. So they’d have at least one option for insurance.

2. Provide some competition to insurers, perhaps after the restriction on interstate insurance sales be lifted. (But see my above fear about how “lowest minimum price” might actually function.)

3. Help ease a transition away from employer provided health insurance and from employer mandates under ACA.

4. Provide a way to ease the pressure on insurers, maybe by permitting them to cap lifetime contributions, after which point patients might transfer to a public option.

All that’s very sketchy and I’m making a lot of assumptions about what works. (I’m also out of my element, not knowing much about insurance or health care provision.) I agree with Megan McArdle when she says simply having the government run things won’t automatically drive down costs. But I’m hopeful that if done right, a public option could be helpful.Report

I really dislike this idea, because it seems primed for a regulatory race-to-the-bottom where some state like North Dakota decides it wants a bunch of tax revenue from health insurance and therefore guts its regulations. Then other states can’t do anything to enforce now-standard regulations on health insurance.

Inter state insurance sales face one huuuge problem. Insurance companies offer care within their networks. They don’t’ have giant nation wide networks so any company in ND or Delaware wouldn’t have a network to offer HI is Cali or WA or NJ. Building those networks either wouldn’t happen at all, so companies wouldn’t get in those markets, have giant problems with adjusting for local procedure costs and would add cost and more paperwork to do so. It is a ideological solution that ignores the reality of how health insurance works.Report

Well, that can be legislated or regulated. “No foreign carrier may offer coverage in a given region unless [X] number of physicians within that region have indicated that they will accept that carrier’s coverage.”

Where “[X] number of physicians” really means so many G.P.’s, so many OB/GYNs, so many dermatologists, so many oncologists, etc., such that a typical constellation of oft-used specialists are reasonably accessible to patients.

Now, this means more regulation and oversight, of course, but the truth is that today’s GOP doesn’t really have a problem with that sort of thing. I strongly suspect that the only significant problem most GOP legislators really have with Obamacare are the first three syllables of the program’s label.Report

Where “[X] number of physicians” really means so many G.P.’s, so many OB/GYNs, so many dermatologists, so many oncologists, etc., such that a typical constellation of oft-used specialists are reasonably accessible to patients.

That already *is* the law. Well,not ‘so many’, but there maximum distance rules about in-network services.

Which means selling across state lines is often *impossible*. Literally impossible. Because when state X passes a ‘buying across state line’ laws allow you to sell an insurance plan in X if you can sell it in Y, but Y won’t let you sell it in Y because…you don’t have any doctors in Y in your network, you just have them in X. Oops.

Well yeah but insurance companies are unlikely to even want to build those kind of networks. It means a lot of effort and risk to try to move into new areas. The big companies already do that do a degree but it isn’t like all the big players are trying to move into every state. The smaller companies don’t’ have the resources. Setting up nationwide networks is just unlikely.Report

I really dislike this idea, because it seems primed for a regulatory race-to-the-bottom where some state like North Dakota decides it wants a bunch of tax revenue from health insurance and therefore guts its regulations. Then other states can’t do anything to enforce now-standard regulations on health insurance.

Oh, they can’t do that. And *insurance* companies know that, which is why they aren’t pushing for it. *Republicans*, however, have not caught the memo, and are still pushing to allow insurance companies to do something that is literally impossible.

Not a bad idea, but they *literally* cannot happen, except in a few edge cases. Yes, the Republicans are actually that stupid.

Why? (Not why are Republicans that stupid, why can’t it happen?)

Because the way the laws are written (And my state actually *has* the ability for people to purchase insurance across state lines!), for a (for example) New York insurance plan to be legal to sale in Georgia, it has to be legal to be sold New York.

With me so far?

Now, for a plan to be legal to sell to people in any location, it has to have *doctors* and *hospitals* around those people. It is not legal to create a place that only has western New York medical stuff in it, and sell it New York *City* so people have to travel across the state to see a doctor. The distance people can be required to travel to reach a doctor varies by state, but there’s always *some* requirement…you can only sell a plan to people in a certain zip code if those people can get in-network care within X miles.

Catch the paradox yet? For a New York plan to be legal to buy in Georgia, it has be legal to buy in New York. And it can only be legal to buy in New York if it, at minimum, *has doctors in New York*.

Insurance companies *can’t* make a *Georgia-only* plan and operate it under *New York* law, because New York law doesn’t let you sell insurance to New Yorkers that people would have to drive to Georgia to use! And since they can’t sell the plan in New York…they can’t sell that plan in Georgia.

Ooooops. The entire concept of selling insurance across state lines for a ‘regulatory race-to-the-bottom’ is completely fucking nonsensical and DOA.

Well, insurance companies could, essentially, try to create two separate networks, one in New York and one in Georgia, and sell ‘the same plan’ in both places and just assume that people are only going to access the closest one, but that is an actuarial *nightmare* and no one is going to do that.

The only place anyone might actually sell plans across state lines is…literally doing them across a state line, like having a Kansas City plan that has both Kansas and Missouri providers in it.Report

The only place anyone might actually sell plans across state lines is…literally doing them across a state line, like having a Kansas City plan that has both Kansas and Missouri providers in it.

These, BTW, already exist. It’s just one plan with Kansas+Missouri doctors on one side of the river, and a different plan with Kansas+Missouri doctors on the other side. It’s perfectly legal to include *doctors* in another state on a plan.

Maybe even it’s currently the same company doing it, and just abiding by two different sets of regulations depending on where the plan is sold. Changing the laws to allow selling across state lines would allow them to pick a set of regulations to follow.

Maybe that’s a good idea, and would make thing cheaper because of less overhead. Maybe it’s not a good idea because they’d automatically pick the laxer regulations. I don’t know.

But I do know it sure is a much more *limited* idea that Republicans (And Democrats!) seem to think, and would cause absolutely no change whatsoever in the vast majority of markets. It would neither magically fix everything *or* cause a race to the bottom.Report

Yes, a *plan* still can cover things in multiple states, it just can’t be *sold* to people in multiple states.

Well, it _can_, but the plan has to follow all the rules of all states it’s being sold in. Unless they have some sort of insurance compact with other states. (Which is basically ‘allow people to buy across state lines’, but only for plans from *specific*, usually nearby, states.)

And, my comments were about individual plans.

With employer-provided plans, I think it depends on where the employer is, not where the employees live. I.e., a company near the line buys a plan in the state they’re in, and someone living across a line can still be on it.

My point is not that insurance plans across state lines doesn’t exist, my point is that plans sold across state lines requires *providers in the original states* be on the plan, which makes it nearly nonsensical that the same thing will happen to health insurance as what happened to, for example, credit card companies, where they all operate under Delaware law.

Which is what Republicans desperately seem to want to happen because they delusionally think HI companies want it, Democrats desperately try to stop because they delusionally think it can happen, and health insurance companies just stare baffled at the entire nonsensical thing.

I mean, it *is* possible that one day, Republicans could catch on to this and start writing laws that ‘allow insurance plans to be sold in this state that *could*, hypoethically, be sold in other states if they had any providers in that state, even if they don’t, but that would sorta give the game away. Right now the laws Republicans are trying to pass are ‘allow insurance plans to be sold in this state if they’re able to be sold in other states’, and no one seems to notice that ‘able to be sold in other states’ requires, uh, providers in those states, because you cannot legally sell a plan with no local providers.Report

I don’t understand what it is about rightists that makes them refuse to accept the government is good at non-military things.

The government ALREADY DOES provide far cheaper healthcare than the private sector, and it does it via economies of scale, low overhead, and by not engaging in abusive cycles of claim rejections and litigation that dramatically increase transaction costs. Why don’t you think that would work in the ACA marketplace?

Moreover, why not try? If the government sucks at it, they’ll be outcompeted. If it doesn’t, people will get a better choice than they currently have. Seems like a nice market experiment to my “leftist” sensibilities.Report

You think government is magic and can deliver health insurance more cheaply than private insurers can.

‘Health insurance’ is not a thing. It is not a good, it is not a service. It is just a middle man, and it’s just a middle man *of money*. That’s it. That is all that is.

‘Health insurance’ is a bunch of bureaucracy, plus collecting and distributing money. That is the entire thing. It is not like building roads or selling cookies or washing windows, where there might be some private innovation.

I am hard pressed to see *how* private industry, which has to take a cut of the profits, *could* possibly do that as cheaply as the government. The government, after all, is an expert at collecting money from people, and actually already has a system for distributing it to the medical industry also!

Nor, I should point out, can ‘health insurance’ suffer from the ‘failure to predict the market’ that most government planned markets suffer from, because it doesn’t actually make anything and thus cannot have shortages or excesses.

The only possible argument is that government’s bureaucracy would be larger than private industry, as the government has little incentive to reduce that…which is *possibly* true, but, OTOH, the fact that every medical provider has to have their own bureaucracy to deal with dozens of private companies sorta outweighs that.Report

It’s better — in insurance, the larger and more varied your risk pool is, the more closely you can predict costs. Which means the more properly priced your premiums are, the more accurate your forecasts, etc.

One way single-payer (whether nationalized, private-public hybrids, etc) work so cheaply is having a sufficient data set and proper risk spreading.

A lot of rather…odd…problems with insurers also revolves around clients jumping ship — you make a client whose medical profile suggests an expensive problem jump through plenty of hoops, hoping he’ll switch insurance providers before you have to pay out the nose for whatever he’s got. (My Dad had that fun. When everyone was screaming about wait times for MRI’s in Canada, my Dad spent 12 months trying to get one approved in the US with a reputable company. They didn’t want to, because it almost certainly would have shown bone spurs, which require an expensive surgery to correct. Instead, he had to undergo all sorts of things — including physical therapy, wherein his therapist basically told him it was BS and that it was clearly a nerve issue)Report

Insurance is a way to make #1 more palatable. However, mixing the two is merely a very good way to get the worst of both worlds. Spend a lot of money on the exchanges and your health insurance will get you a place at the back of the line.

Now, you say:I am hard pressed to see *how* private industry, which has to take a cut of the profits, *could* possibly do that as cheaply as the government. The government, after all, is an expert at collecting money from people, and actually already has a system for distributing it to the medical industry also!

If “cheaply” is the measurement we care about, we need to stop doing #1 yesterday and shift fully to #2.

At which point we can start freaking out about how some people have figured out ways to use money to jump place in line.

We can also argue over whether distributing healthcare by price has resulted in more/better medical products than distributing healthcare by queue. (There is a lot of movement in here that might, at the end of the day, be little more than churn. For example, removing Painkiller X from the market right before it leaves patent protection and replacing it with Painkiller X Now With Antacid! which has patent protection for an additional however many years is not exactly groundbreaking research (especially if you get the same effect from taking Painkiller X and two Rolaids).)

But there are costs and benefits to doing things by #2. There are (different) costs and benefits to doing things by #1. A healthy mix of both seems to be a good way to get the costs of both without the benefits of both.Report

Spend a lot of money on the exchanges and your health insurance will get you a place at the back of the line.

I don’t know if it’s actually what you’re saying, but I’ve seen other people say things like this, and I’m completely baffled at the idea that medical providers would, in any manner, care that insurance was gotten through the exchanges.

There are *valid* reasons for them to do that with Medicare, because Medicare forces doctors to accept lower rates.

But people who got insurance on the exchange have…completely normal health insurance, provided by an insurance company operating normally in that state. It, presumably, will get the medical provider *whatever that company has negotiated* with that provider, which is probably the same for *all* their plans, exchange and otherwise. Yes, the plan might be *narrower* for exchange plans, but that means ‘only the providers that are cheaper’, not ‘we will pay providers less’

Somewhere, the logic went in people’s head that said ‘1) Doctors don’t like dealing with Medicaid, 2) Medicaid is government provided insurance. 3) The exchanges are *sorta* government provided. Thus) Doctors must not like them either’, but the problem is that makes no sense. Doctors don’t dislike Medicaid because it is government provided, they dislike it because they are *required by law* to charge certain prices to Medicaid, and that doesn’t exist with exchange insurance.

If I present my Blue Cross/Blue Shield insurance, and the doctor is on that plan, they don’t care one damn where I bought that plan, or even if that’s a plan that is specific to the exchange. They get $X from Blue Cross/Blue Shield regardless.Report

I don’t know if it’s actually what you’re saying, but I’ve seen other people say things like this, and I’m completely baffled at the idea that medical providers would, in any manner, care that insurance was gotten through the exchanges.

This isn’t what I’m saying.

It’s more that I’m saying that we’ve got a ton of people purchasing insurance (and spending a lot of money for it, premiums going up and whatnot) and they are not getting particularly timely health care. Long waits for a doctor’s visit, long waits for a specialist visit. If you’ve got a high deductible for your plan (something a lot of people do), you’re going to find that your insurance doesn’t cover a lot of what you’re having done because a large chunk of GP-level stuff isn’t as expensive as the deductible. (I’m thinking annual checkups, blood work, so on and so forth.) However, this large chunk of stuff requires that you get in line and wait and wait and wait. (My last so-called “annual” checkup was 8 months after we requested it.)

They’re paying out the nose. They’re waiting forever.

And, god help them if their annual deductible is $5000 and they need $4999 worth of work done.

I’m not talking about the doctors. I’m talking about the people waiting in line despite paying out the nose for their health insurance.

Good news for the insurance companies: there are a lot more insured people than there used to be!Report

People with insurance are getting plenty of health care. The biggest reason companies are dropping out of the market is because the people who haven’t had insurance use the hell out of it when they get it. The companies even have a name for this, which i cant’ remember now, it such a common phenomenon. People who have HI now are getting more care now to deal with problems they deferred dealing with that. That seems like a good thing.Report

My last so-called “annual” checkup was 8 months after we requested it.)

I have a $ 2,000 deductible plan. It comes with a free annual checkup. I only get one of those a year. I think I can have my annual checkup 10 or so months after the previous one if needed. But that’s it. Whatever else, it goes in the deductible.

But I don’t need to wait eight months after calling my doctor to schedule a check up. If my doctor had an opening (hehe, you are joking), I can walk in and get my check up.

Terrorist hunting is something played more with the darker skinned folks, sure. The Irish and the other batshit crazy white folks don’t get shot by the US Government, now do they? Public/Private rape preserves are something that is done with darker skinned folks too. See Myanmar. (Though here you can at least cite the Ukraine, as a place where it happens to white folks too).Report

As much of the third world has begun its baby steps to enter the first world, they’ve abandoned a diet that relies heavily on a vegetarianism that makes exceptions for eggs and dairy and have started eating a great deal more meat. Given that meat is murder, the world is immeasurably worse off than it was when these additional hundreds of millions of people could not afford to eat fish, chicken, pork, or beef because they lived on less than a dollar a day.

When you hear some fan of GDP going up talk about people being lifted out of poverty, think about a mountain of dead chickens because that is what that means.Report

Is there a single treatment for a single ailment that should be withheld from an undocumented dreamer who doesn’t have insurance that should be available to Nobel Laureate Barack Obama were he to get the same ailment? (That is to say: is one of the goals to make sure that no one gets left behind by our health care?)

As for the warfare and social justice sections… there are a lot of premises that we don’t share to the point where I’m not confident that we share enough common ground for us to properly argue about what The Good would entail.

But the question about whether more money and more power ought to provide better health care in an ideal system has interesting implications.Report

I think that’s only a meaningful criticism if you have an alternative that will do a better job meeting our moral obligations. I don’t see much reason to believe that prohibiting people from spending their own money on care is going to help us do so.

So if I find examples of “well, every culture does that”, what else ought I be able to exclude from criticism?

I’m not sure how to respond to criticism of the fact that every society has limited resources to devote to healthcare.Report

“Meaningful criticism” to my mind is criticism that can be addressed by reform.

I don’t think “better”, in this instance, is a weasel word. You’ve asserted a moral obligation to avoid withholding life-saving and ameliorative care to “the poor”. Providing more life-saving and ameliorative care to people who don’t have the money to afford it themselves will do a better job meeting those obligations than providing less of such care will do, right?Report

I imagine that there are “sustainably” questions that we could use to dip, dodge and weave. There were also a number of issues with England doing this thing where if you used private funds to get private treatment (for example, for drugs that weren’t covered), England would drop you from the NHS.

Elias and I got into that because he argued that England had stopped doing that and so people should stop bringing it up and I found examples of England still doing it.

Maybe England has stopped doing it for realsies now, though. If so, people should stop bringing it up.

Providing more life-saving and ameliorative care to people who don’t have the money to afford it themselves will do a better job meeting those obligations than providing less of such care will do, right?

I think that the argument is that if you’re not doing everything, you’re not meeting your obligation and arguing over degrees of falling short is failing to splitting hairs rather than meeting obligations.Report

That thing that England was and may still be doing with the NHS falls under the biggest weasel phrase that I used–“as far as I know”. Anyway, that sounds like a dumb idea and if they’re still doing it in England, they should stop.

I think that the argument is that if you’re not doing everything, you’re not meeting your obligation and arguing over degrees of falling short is failing to splitting hairs rather than meeting obligations.

Taking that argument seriously seems like a great way to avoid even trying to meet moral obligations, since (more or less by definition) you’ll never actually do enough.Report

Anyway, that sounds like a dumb idea and if they’re still doing it in England, they should stop.

From what *I* recall of these allegations, what it actually is that the NHS covers a bunch of stuff, and complications from that stuff.

If you go and have stuff done that the NHS doesn’t cover at all, they will also not cover complications from that.

I.e., if you pay for a private heart bypass, and have complications from that, NHS will cover the complications, because the NHS covers heart bypasses, even if they didn’t do *yours*.

But if you pay for some medical procedure the NHS doesn’t do at all…they won’t cover problems from that. You can still, I would assume, get some sort of help if the complication was life-threatening, but you’re going to be paying for it.

Basically, the NHS is saying ‘Look, you can do private stuff all you want, but we absolutely refuse to deal with any of that.’

Now, WRT drugs, it’s entirely possible that there’s some sort of rules about drug interactions. If you’re being prescribed a drug that the NHS does not cover, then, yes, I can see the NHS saying ‘Yeah, we’re not covering any more of your drugs…what if our covered drugs interact with the non-covered drugs?’ (Note that NHS doctors aren’t going to prescribe drugs the NHS won’t cover, so if you’re taking non-NHS drugs, you’re already at some non-NHS doctor.)

But, as far as I know, the people will *still* be on the NHS. I’d actually like to see a documented instance of someone being *dropped* from NHS, as opposed to NHS just saying ‘Yeah, we’re not covering that, or that, or that, or your drugs, because you’ve mixed in non-NHS-approved stuff with all of them and we refuse to spend money helping you with that stuff.’ and the customer just getting annoyed that nothing is covered anymore and leaving NHS himself.Report

I’m not sure I’d parse “moral obligations” as generally referring to that sort of completely open-ended requirement. “Give until it hurts,” may be hard for many people to comply with, but it’s a far cry from, “Give until there’s nothing left”.

Religious traditions that insist on the importance of charity also often provide guidelines about how much you’re supposed to give, and those guidelines aren’t usually, “everything but the shirt on your back, and that’s negotiable.”Report

Pillsy: As far I as know, no universal healthcare system makes much of an effort to prevent people from buying more and better care than standard as long as they have the money to do so.

There will be pushes to prevent this. Just like there are pushes to make private schooling illegal so everyone must go to public schools – so that when people can’t opt of of a bad system, they’re forced to make it better.Report

There may be some people who want to do that, but as far as I know, in places where they have universal systems, none of those pushes have actually been successful. It’s not like the occasional suggestions that we ban private schools actually get anywhere.Report

Who is pushing to make private school illegal (which, for the record, is different from opposing charter schools, where the issue is whether the government should pay private schools to educate students).Report

I think I saw a #slatepitch to that effect once. Or maybe it was just that if you send your kids to private school you’re bad and you should feel bad. Either way, laws against private schools are not exactly sweeping the nation.Report

I wasn’t aware that anyone was proposing making it illegal to drink soda. I await the citations that will no doubt puncture my bubble of blissful ignorance with some impatience, especially as I am serenely certain that you wouldn’t do something as foolish as arguing that taxing something is the same thing as banning it.Report

Well, yes, but if we’re taking “preferential tax treatment and subsidization is the same as banning the alternatives”, then renting an apartment is also illegal. For that matter, so is making soda with cane sugar instead of HFCS.

Soda taxes can be (and probably are) a pretty bad idea without pretending that they’re tantamount to a ban.Report

Bloomberg wanted to ban sugary drinks over a certain size (I believe 20 ounces). I think “sugary” was defined based on how many calories were derived from sugar but I could be wrong. It included fountain drinks and bottled/cans beverages. It had a carve out for drinks that contained a certain portion of their volume from milk. This was basically to allow Starbucks to avoid the rule. The use of volume meant that a drink with a huge head of foamed milk — which comprises very little of the actual drink itself but takes up much space — was fair game.

So, yea, there was quite a bit of classism/cultural judgment going on.Report

Sometimes I wonder why we are even having this conversation. There’s plenty of data to suggest that Boomers as a demographic were more liberal in their voting than either Silents or Gen-Xers. And more liberal than the Greatest Generation, too. We should be natural allies with Millenials, and I think of myself as such. But people keep trying to drive that wedge deeper.

Look at the age breakdown. The age category 50-64 is populated entirely with Boomers (I’m included in it). There is a notably higher fraction voting against Prop 8 in that category than the next youngest or older categories. Only the 18-29 categories had higher percentages against, and that’s the Millennials. Good for them!

There is a long tradition of reporting a demographic as being “for” a position or candidate, when the break is 52-48 or something. Thus I find that “white males” are for Trump, and I wonder when I turned into liver and got chopped up. Language like “break for” or “favor” seems more accurate to me. Am I splitting hairs? It seems important to me to exist, to witness, in fact, that no, not everybody with my demographic characteristics thinks the same way. That’s Diversity 101, it seems to me.Report

I think the Boomers are pretty evenly split and it obviously depends on a variety of factors including geography. There were Boomers who were Freedom Riders and marching against Vietnam. There were probably plenty of Boomers who supporter George Wallace over Katzenbach during the famous stare down at the steps of the University of Alabama.

The Silent Generation is largely very conservative compared to the Boomers and the Greatest Generation. Many in the Greatest Generation did stay loyal to the New Deal.

Generation X is also split based upon when their political awakening came to be. People with fond memories of Reagan are different than those who came of political age during the Clinton I administration. The oldest of Generation X were young teenagers in 1980. Others are more likely to remember Bill Clinton’s 1992 election more easily.Report

Yeah, age seems kind of a non-sequitur when it comes to political orientation. In one sense people get more conservative as they get older, but I think of it as more patient, rather than more conservative. Personally, I got more liberal.Report

Well, we aren’t the largest demographic group in America any more. That line got crossed last year.

Frankly, I’m getting tired of hearing the same damn music in restaurants over and over, and I wouldn’t mind hearing something new. Not that the Seventies weren’t awesome, but we don’t really need a Captain and Tenille revival.

Another line that was crossed in the last 8 years is that the “white and christian” demographic went from 54 percent to 47 percent. This seems pretty significant, really.Report

I think there are some misconceptions in this piece. Possibly because you are an ex-pat.

The US has long had a force that resisted even the slightest bits of social welfare as compared to other nations. Rugged individualism and all. There was even a split during the Great Depression because old Democrats like Al Smith thought that social welfare was fine for women and children but not for men. Men should just be rugged individuals.

There are also plenty of conservative millennials. It is not all just happiness and rainbows.Report

The lumping together and naming of generations is a relatively new thing, pretty much starting with the Baby Boom after WWII. And it becomes a bit too easy and pat to generalize about them, to where I am automatically wary of almost any article purporting to discuss them.

As mentioned above, the difference between members of the same age cohort are often bigger than other cohorts. Its not to dismiss entirely the effects that coming of age in a similar time can have; but they are one set of factors, and easily overemphasized.

And yeah, every single criticism I have ever heard about succeeding generations, I heard about mine.Report

I really appreciate the passion in this piece. In every year, every era, there are always things to be proud of and things that are still a mess and need to be fixed. What those things are depend entirely on your personal beliefs, ethics, context, etc and age/generation are much less likely to have an impact. However, despite the fact that I agree with much in the call for more progressivism in public policy, I felt my ire rising due to the confrontational tone. Just as it is annoying for older people to lecture young ‘uns on why they don’t know what they are talking about, it is just as annoying for younger people to lecture their “elders” on how they messed it all up for everyone and thanks for leaving us this mess to clean up. Broad brush strokes miss all the nuance and details.

In truth, society includes all people from newborns to people who remember when talkies first came to their local theater, and we have to work with them, and accept that people of good will, who have only good intentions, will disagree with our world view. Nothing gets better when we don’t listen to each other.

Many things about this country and world are much better off than 20 years ago, and many things are stagnated or worse than they were 20 years ago. The causes are so complicated that seemingly easy answers make me skeptical. Beware the easy answers.Report

Yeah, watching some of the younger voters head for the fainting couches at times has been pretty hilarious.

Apparently finding out that candidates test and script messages tightly, often reach out to reporters (and reporters reach out to them) to offer comments and try to shape news stories, and gripe internally about their opponents is just shocking to some of them.

I’m not sure how they thought it worked, but the basics of how politics operates (including that it ain’t beanbag) was a surprise.Report

“haha! You buncha dumb kids, didn’t you know that politicians stab each other in the back and twist the knife every chance they get? Didn’t you expect old white rich people to stomp on your dreams of a better world? Oh now go cry about it, that’s right, did I trigger you? Did I invade your safe space? Go cry, little baby, go cry about how I broke your toy. Good thing you learned your lesson!”Report

I dunno, bro, you’re the enlightened intellectual ‘splainin’ to me about how it’s foolish entitled whining, “heading for the fainting couches”, to expect that, hey, maybe journalists should be something other than unacknowledged PR flacks.Report

My general impression of this is the seminal, “My peer groups preferred social & policy positions are not being enabled as quickly as we’d prefer, and it’s because all you old fuddy-duddies are resisting our efforts! Can’t you all just die already?!”

Ah, youth, all the time in the world, and no patience for any of it.Report

I wonder what the bar-chart making the rounds claiming that “only” 45% of Gen Xers are “stressed” about the election as compared to nearly 60% of older Boomers/Silent gen and 56% of Millennials means. (Possibly not statistically significant, but whatever).

I admit my cynical “Xer” take on it is “We’ve already given up; we’ve been expecting the band to strike up ‘Nearer My God To Thee’ for about fifteen years now.” More likely it’s that most of us are contending with teen or tween kids, jobs, aging parents, and all the other urgent stuff of day to day life. (I would say **I** am stressed: not a good choice in the bunch as far as I can see – but then I have no kids and my aging parents are 700 miles away, so I have fewer things to divert my attention. And also, I’m single and totally dependent on myself to fund my retirement and everything else)Report

I was surprised not to see education on this list. That to me, is the most stunning one.

Many boomers received free or near-free educations, and to this day have fond memories of working their way through college and emerging debt free. Those memories are so fond, college students now are critized for not doing the same thing.

But here’s the difference. In 1975, in-state tuition and the Universities of California was $680. Now it is $12,294. $680 in 1975 is about $3,200 in today’s dollars, meaning students going to in-state public college need to come up with an extra $9,000 (or 900 hours at $10/hour post-tax) to make up for the fact that their elders refuse to provide the same public support to public education those same elders enjoyed in their youth.Report

IIRC Holly is a Brit living in the US while the UK does have student loans now, they are nowhere near as bad as the US. Then again, very few places are.

The student loan thing is the big gripe I think millennials can have with the Boomers. Even Gen X can have this gripe.

I was at Cal on Saturday for a performance at Zellerbach Hall. Our tickets cost north of 62.They had posters for some original productions from the late 1960s and early 1970s. Those tickets cost 1-3 dollars. Even if you adjust for inflation, a 3 dollar ticket in 1968 would cost 21 dollars today.

The radical anti-tax decades caused a burden shift on costs. Now many argue that this is how it should be though because most people still don’t attend college or cultural events. I disagree but I haven’t come up with a winning argument to convince the true cost crowd yet.Report

A few decades ago, our politicians and other elites felt that subsidized education and cultural events were really important for maintaining a society with social and economic advancement. Even if most people did not attend college, plenty of first-generation college students benefited from low-tuition costs.

Even if most people did not attend cultural performances at Zellerbach Hall, keeping the tickets relatively low cost would still make it an option for enrichment.

But sometime in the 1970s or maybe earlier, a different form of thinking came into form. This argument was “Most people do not attend college, why should people who don’t attend college help pay for the costs of low-college tuition.” Same with cultural performances.

And for some reason this argument worked and worked very well, the poor did not think “Maybe my children or grandchildren will attend college and they can benefit from low-tuition.” They ended up thinking “I don’t want to pay a bunch so kids can go to college cheaply.” The Boomers did not think about how they benefited from low tuition and how their kids could have the same but decided they did not want the higher tax bills.

Now in a Democratic society, this is the right of the majority to decide as such. I think it is a mistake that they did though.Report

But sometime in the 1970s or maybe earlier, a different form of thinking came into form. This argument was “Most people do not attend college, why should people who don’t attend college help pay for the costs of low-college tuition.”

I’ll speak for one state based on time working on the budget staff for the state legislature, but I’ve seen nothing to suggest that Colorado is atypical. Consider 1965 and 2015, and look at the makeup of the state budget. In 2015, two-thirds of state general fund spending was K-12 education and Medicaid. In 1965, the totals for those came to zero. Both of those programs have grown far faster than state GDP. State/local revenues have a very real political cap on the order of 10% of state GDP. Something had to give.

Most of the General Assembly have degrees from Colorado public colleges and universities (despite the enormous influx in population). Almost nobody on either side of the aisle is happy about cutting funding for higher ed. But to quote one of the students in a mock state government program where I helped oversee their budget exercise: “This is impossible! We have to cut good things!” Generally roads and higher ed, which have dedicated partial revenue streams. Higher ed harder, because it has no constitutional protections.Report

To be fair, how much of that increase is lack of taxpayer support and how much is because boomers were content to have a campus with just the educational basics and maybe a student union, and millennials want modern dorms, entertainment venues, health care, and fitness facilities, all on campus and included with tuition?Report

Also, why do we need to know exactly how many costs are non-analagous to 1975, and litigate which would have existed in 1975 if people had thought of ’em, before we can acknowledge that the–let’s say moochers–who went to college for $680/year are now calling kids lazy / entitled for not paying their way through an education 4x as expensive so that the moochers can avoid higher taxes.Report

I’m less interested in calling kids lazy than I am in saying that asking for a significant increase in public financial support for institutions that are experiencing (dare I say) runaway inflation before we have a plan to deal with that inflation is a very bad idea.Report

I think this is blaming Millennials for something they did not create.

The modern tuition arms race began in the late 1980s as far as I can tell. Well before many millennials were even born. The President of George Washington in DC figured out that he could turn his work-a-day university into a Veblen good by continuously increasing tuition. He bragged about this in a cover article for the Atlantic and never looked back.

The late 1980s is when the US News and World Report started publishing their annual rankings.

One thing I think the US News and World Report did was destroy the concept of the local university. One where you went if you were a first-generation college student and got a good education and then stayed in the relative community. This happened at all levels of education.

My law school is a part of a larger university that is controlled by the Jesuits. For decades, they educated local kids (mainly Catholic obviously) and many of these kids were working-class and the first in their families to attend college. The law school was the same, they were dedicated to educating the bar and bench of San Francisco and were perfectly well-respected in the Bay Area/Northern California legal community.

But greater forces changed this. Now the undergrad campus tries to attract wealthy students from Asia and the law school lost its status as a well-worn provider of the local bar and bench. Everyone goes for prestige.

I think US News and World Report rankings destroyed the concept of the local and locally respected university and now those colleges are doing what they can to compete for students.

The elite colleges are still relatively to very spartan in their amenities because they can attract students on their reputation alone. It is “second-rate” universities that need to compete on amenities and many of these are state schools dealing with a dearth of funding. Also for every story about fancy dorms, I can find several about colleges that are lacking the money to spend on real infrastructure.

I’ll concede, tuition inflation is not the creation of Millennials, they are merely the inheritors of it. But are Millennials calling for a return to the more spartan academic environment, because all I hear are calls for more public support of tuition, without any call to roll back a lot of what inflated tuition in the first place.

UNWR and it’s damn highly subjective rankings, on the other hand… (I hated those things when I worked as academic staff).Report

Millennials like every other generation are too vast and I suspect it depends on where they are going.

The Millennials who seem to benefit the most from fancy dorms are upper-middle class and above from a socio-economic status but average to somewhat above average from an academic standpoint. The universities that really do the luxury dorm thing are middling to semi-elite schools as far as I can tell. The old joke was that George Washington University stood for “Georgetown Waitlist University.” Even my very hard to get into undergrad had a reputation as being a second-choice for people who were rejected from Brown.

Do you remember a few years ago when I talked about a book called Paying for the Party? The book was written about Indiana University from two sociologists who taught there. They called their university a mid level state school. Better than many but still far from being a public Ivy like Cal, Michigan, UVA, etc. Indiana decided to compete by offering “business-lite” majors like “Travel and Leisure Studies” to well-connected, rich kids and fancy dorms.* These kids ended up with good jobs because of family wealth and connections. Poor, first-generation college students ended up trying to emulate the rich kids but flamed out because they lacked the wealth, aesthetics, and social connections to make the business-lite majors work.

The issue I think with a lot of writing about college is that the media (and perhaps us) images the average college student as an 18-22 year old who is probably white, probably middle-class, and gonna graduate on time or close to it.

The above is a minority college-student. Most college students are now a bit older, attending college or university part-time, and usually attend close to home. Many don’t live in dorms.

The majority of CUNY students are not middle-class white kids. They are POC and first-generation college students. I think they just want buildings that don’t leak and comfortable desks.Report

The national rankings killed my alma mater, starting a year before I attended. My class could already see the inevitability, even if it took another decade for the final diagnosis, and even now there’s still a twitch from a finger or eyelid every now and then. Maybe it’s only mostly dead.Report

So again, why? Community colleges are often public, so their budgets are public. We should be able to look at this and tease out the spike. Is it staffing or salary/benefit increases, facilities overhead, services increasing, declining public support?

I’m certain they all contribute something to the problem, but something has to cause that severe of a spike.

(Note I just looked at the tuition of the community college I went to after I was discharged, and the cost has more than doubled in 20 years.)Report

Administration, I would bet. Athletics, in the 4 year schools (collegiate athletics is, aside from a handful of schools, a constant net in terms of money).

*shrug*. The general trend for faculty has been to keep pay fairly low (except for rock stars/student draws) and to use TA’s and associate professors who aren’t paid a living wage to cover the bulk of the classes.

So it’s not going to overpaid professors, by and large. It might be going to shiny new buildings, except it’s doing that in schools that don’t have them. It could be going to athletics (which has always been a problem), except it’s happening in schools with virtually no athletics programs.

And administration — and I’m not talking the “people working the student aid office — seems to be bloating, and like CEO pay seems prone towards both a self-reinforcing cycle of increases and a low-oversight position.

If it was JUST 4 year schools, or JUST top-end football schools, or JUST state or JUST private schools……but it’s all of them, across the board. Community colleges without frills or athletics programs have seen the same giant jumps in prices.

The money is clearly going to someone, and by all the reporting on the subject, it’s clearly not the bulk of the teaching staff or the basic administrative (as in student aid offices, departmental secretaries, etc) staff.Report

Probably because there’s no realistic way to trim the bloat. “State” schools are more akin to “State supported” not “State run”. Private schools are, of course, free to do whatever they want with the money.

And nobody wants to cut college off entirely from anyone who isn’t upper-middle-class or incredibly lucky, given the income inequality problems we already have.

But mostly, because it’s a thorny problem that has a lot in common with CEO pay (which screws shareholders just as hard as high college prices screw students), fixing that via collective action (ie, government) opens up some particularly tricky doors.

About the best methodology I can see is to have state’s tell their state supported schools to open their books for a full audit and set what the Leg thinks is appropriate salaries. With the fond hope that, having made the schools cheaper, it will force other schools to lower their prices.

And the number of pitfalls and horror-filled possibilities there — even ASSUMING good will, competence, and serious effort on behalf of the Leg (I don’t know about your state, but in Texas we’d be lucky to get one of the three) — stripping out ideology, partisanship and just pretending everyone has pristine motives to make these salaries reasonable — how do you determine what’s fair without referencing inflated salaries everywhere else? How do you deal with blowback from people claiming you’re hurting the school’s ability to attract talent?

And of course if you DID this, you’d find other schools would — if they cut prices at all — cut them from their teaching and support staff, because the people MAKING the cuts and salaries decisions are the overpaid ones in the first place. Their money would be the last cut.

I mean the only other solid solution I’ve got is similar to a collective bargaining based approach — free college (or highly subsidized), but to the extent that you get X per student from the State (and you can’t charge them any more, or only a limited amount, etc), and to qualify for the program you have to meet certain rigorous standards and maintain them.

Suddenly finding half your client base is making the same demands might change behavior. But again, without rigorous standards enforcement — you’ll end up with poorly maintained grounds, buildings, libraries, and temporary and highly underpaid staff before you see the Dean of Whatever cutting his 350k a year salary, free house and car, and two million dollar travel and entertainment budget for ‘fundraising for the endowment’ or whatever.Report

Honestly, I think the most effective ‘fix’ would come from employers deciding to be realistic about the signal an education really represents. Following that, I’d focus on student aid and bankruptcy discharging and/or realistic career forecasts.

The simplest fix would be, IMHO, for the federal student aid office to make public the stats regarding the frequency of repayment modifications requested by students who attended a given school, and then include some context for those stats on their website. I wouldn’t expect every student to be able to fully grok the stats, but guidance counselors and loan officers can and could help students make good decisions.Report

Students can push back, but due to the loan structure they won’t feel the bite until AFTER they’ve paid for the product. (And as most students are under 25, basic neurology and life experience issues say they can’t model the cost/benefits efficiently prior to undertaking college).

Employer’s won’t push back, because requiring a college degree is free to them. We don’t have a super tight labor market (and if we did, the Fed would jump on it with both feet), so requiring college degrees simply winnows out the applicants for them.

The government can’t push back on loans because the student loan industry got privatized pretty heavily anyways, and the loan companies don’t push back because the default risk is on the government — not them. Enforcement and default ends up on the government’s dime.

And lastly, because the increase is universal, even pushes towards more cost conscious college choices doesn’t help. My son’s paying 4x as much at the local community college as he would have in ’99, and state schools will be the same rough increase.

CC doesn’t quite run him what state-supported ran me in the 90s, but it’s getting close. So even going to school highly budget conscious, he’ll end up with more of a tab than I ran up through 4 years of state school — and a weaker job market to enter.Report

Let’s not forget Baumol’s Cost Disease. Many publicly-funded programs are subject to it: to attract workers, sometimes skilled workers, salaries and benefits have to go up even though productivity hasn’t. Eg, the typical fifth-grade teacher teaches the same amount of material, to the same number of students, as a fifth-grade teacher did 50 years ago.Report

Oops. I was thinking about my comment elsewhere in the thread about state budgets and higher ed getting crowded out by K-12 and Medicaid. Higher ed has long looked at ways to make the faculty side of things more “productive” in a technical cost-per-student sort of way: 700-seat lectures with graduate students doing the grunt work; adjunct faculty; and online courses being three obvious examples. K-12 education and the labor-intense parts of health care, not so much.Report

Depends on the program. Some programs can, if they aren’t directly adding to the school budget, are at least able to fully support themselves (and are thus revenue neutral). That is my understanding at least.Report

I did my undergraduate time at a big-time football state school, where by statute the athletic department got no state funding. The coach’s salary came out of gate receipts, TV revenues, and his side gigs (eg, weekly TV show on local channels). I understand such arrangements are fairly rare.Report

Yup. Parents complain about the cost of college but I have also seen parents, in campus tours, do stuff like, “What? You don’t have a climbing wall/state of the art fitness center/computing center with computers less than six months old/suite-based dormitory with kitchens and laundry rooms for each suite?” and it’s like some of them don’t realize that there’s a link there.

Also, the flood of Federal regulations public unis have to comply with has led to a sharp increase in administrators and offices and all of that. And while I hate having eighteen “bosses,” I also would hate to deal with all the paperwork in re: ADA and everything else all myself.

I will say the increases in tuition, by and large, are not faculty salaries, unless you’re talking about certain private colleges or certain “superstars.” (I make about $60K a year with nearly 20 years experience, and that’s for a 4/3 load)Report

Also, the flood of Federal regulations public unis have to comply with has led to a sharp increase in administrators and offices and all of that.

is correct, and a leading contributor to Admin Bloat, then I have to wonder what, exactly, are we getting for our money to support all this new regulation? Especially if the inflation results in increased public funding.Report

If that was the case, you could also POINT to the flood of new regulations.

Which would have had to have occurred primarily during the Bush administration. College costs didn’t really start the fast rise until right around when Clinton was leaving office.

I think part of the disconnect is there are two types of ‘administration’. There’s clerical and support staff, running everything from libraries to student aid offices to managing departmental schedules and whatnot, and then there’s “Dean” and higher level people. Upper management all the way up to the school version of “board level”.

I don’t have any resources to back the assertion up, but I know we’ve been told in the past five years or so to keep VERY tight attendance records (new Financial Aid rules; it started with having to report “last day attended” for F grades). We are required to submit monthly attendance and grade checks, though I’m not sure if that’s federal or local to my campus.

It’s possible these were on the books before and someone somewhere in an upper office was lax (I would not be surprised) about informing us, but it does seem since 2010 or so, there have been a lot of minor freakouts over things like attendance reporting and whether an F is a “not attending” F or a “failed’ F or a “cheated their ass off” F.

We have also been required to go through:

NIMS training Sexual-harrassment avoidance training “Required reporter” training (HAVEN and similar – if a student comes and tells me their partner is abusing them, by law I must report it now) Training on how to “correctly” do extended time exams for ADA students because someone somewhere donked it up and we all had to be punished… CRASE training (which was mildly traumatic)

I also think ADA laws have gotten stricter. As have Title IX compliance. And this is in a system of shrinking state support….I don’t know how much Federal support we get but I can tell you we took it in the teeth last spring with a big state shortfall, we had mandatory furlough days and for a while our budget was frozen for supplies, which meant if you taught a lab using “consumables” (e.g., chicken liver as a catalase source), you bought it out of your own pocket or cancelled that lab.

All I know is that if anyone complains to me about “idle, overpaid professors,’ they get the stink-eye from me. Maybe at Harvard, maybe at some of the bigger state flagship schools. But not here. I have to budget pretty damn tightly not to have month left over at the end of the money these days.Report

Yeah, I’m required to do all that kind of training too. I spent 4 freaking hours last year (along with every member of my company), going over training that had nothing to do with my job. (Mostly because the people it DID have to do with made a 100 million dollar mistake). My company’s costs haven’t increased 4-fold.

As I’ve said, the bloat appears to be in executive areas — the ‘board’ level kind of guys.

Professors and actual support staff appear to be almost criminally underpaid, unless they’ve got a prestigious chair or the sort of name that draws students or donations.Report

Ha. I watched every employee at Boeing go through an ethics course as part of a settlement (like every employee in the company lost a full day’s work doing this) due to blatant cheating during a bid.

Our parent company (we’re wholly owned) had another subsidiary that screwed up big time with export control, hence the hours of tediousness. (I get why export control’s a big deal, don’t get me wrong. Just not applicable).Report

Actually @jaybird it is a combination of executive staff and academic senate. Getting academic staff that is. And generally, my experience has been that the bloat on campus is the same bloat that pervades most longstanding institutions. Private or public. Mission creep, a sense of “this is how we have always done it,” budgets that can only get bigger never smaller (departmental prestige), growing needs that are real if untimely and a tendency to solve problems by throwing more people at the issue as opposed to clearing deadwood.

One of the problems is that much of what used to be done by prof’s (student worker payroll, dept. lab maintenance, etc.) is too complicated/involved for faculty to get involved with anymore. Payroll systems are incredibly specific, what with all the classifications that get needed to be tax correct, all those machines are really technically advanced and take very specialized skills to maintain. Profs could take care of them, obviously, as they are the smartest people you will ever meet, just ask them! But that would take away from teaching and researching and sabat and…

All kidding aside, a university is a cast system. Tenured faculty is on top, and undesirable work trickles down hill.

When people talk about “administrative bloat”, they aren’t thinking about IT services or people who run payroll. They’re thinking about the executive assistant to the assistant executive of the Department of Redundancy Department. They’re thinking about the Director For Cafeteria Menu Inclusiveness. They’re thinking about the three-member Alumni Outreach Committee who spend 90% of the year on travel, reaching out to alumni who live in Manhattan and Boca Raton.Report

Related to my comment above about my undergraduate alma mater not spending state money on the athletic department… alumni relations are handled by a separate legal entity that also receives no state funding. I’ve only recently come to realize how unusual the financial arrangements are…Report

Well, trying to be exhaustive in listing all of the moving parts that encompass bloat would take all day and then some. But yes, all of those things are bloat, and they come from the same place that the things I mentioned come from.Report

“If the answer is “no,” and you consider yourself an informed and politically conscious adult, you have some explaining to do.”

I’m better off than I was as a kid; I’ve been upwardly mobile, by a long shot, for reasons that have little to do with prevailing economic conditions (ie I’m not an abusive dangerous person nor am I married to one), so it would be pretty hard NOT to be better off than I was as a kid. Am I better off than someone like me was 40 years ago? That’s harder to say. Since I was benefited by Headstart and other social programs that didn’t exist 40 years before *that*, probably.

But I’m shocked that you didn’t even mention climate change. How much good does it do that I’m better off than I would’ve been, if the Millennials around me are fucked because their world will be under natural siege?

Already I can’t plausibly go back to the place where I grew up, and live there, without knowing that it will almost certainly be underwater by the time I’m retirement age.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg of climate related problems that older people have created, that Millennials will have to survive.

And those problems will be worst for the poorest.

In my darkest hours, I am grateful that I’ll probably die before we become blasé about tsunamis. (Though we’ve already become pretty jaded, as a society, about floods.)Report

This was my first thought as well. I don’t know how bad it’s going to get, but even just looking at projected sea level rise and ocean temps, my first thought is “thanks, boomers, for not paying more heed to this”

Of course it’s not boomers per se, but that’s another kettle of dead fish.Report

Well, DDT is no longer used for mosquito abatement, and laws and regulations were put in place to reduce the amount of sulphur in emissions, and CFS were banned from air conditioning, and people generally have fewer children than previously.

In other words, people became alarmed at these problems, and took corrective action. Which is why they didn’t end up destroying the world.Report

The other problem is that DDT/CFCs/etc were moreorless local problems with low cost – tho obviously totalitarian – solutions (eg, DON’T spray that shit on the trees or your hair anymore!). The problem of AGW appears to be intractable (“You want us to destroy our economy??!!”) until, that is, the costs are so massive that remediation makes financial sense. But at that point it will already be too late. And even then, perhaps especially then, affected countries will need to keep the fossil fuels burning to drive an economy to pay for all the mitigation.Report

@densityduck Overpopulation was, and is, an everybody problem. Overpopulation is, arguably, part of the reason Millennials in the United States have so much more trouble finding jobs and paying off loans than their Boomer parents (and it’s also a problem that is fairly irrelevant to individual conduct in wealthy countries, although by resisting immigration so hard, the US and other wealthy countries do contribute indirectly). It’s also hugely hard to do anything about and always has been.

Climate change is specifically a “hey Boomers, by collectively blowing this off in the 80s, and 90s, when it was known about and the rest of us were too young to do much of anything about it, you drove the bus all the way up to the cliff and halfway over and I’m pretty worried it’s 2/3rds of the way over and that will really suck, trying to get this bus back out of this precarious and possibly unsaveable position that you put it in” problem.

Exacerbated by the way that globally rich people of middle age and older are the most enthusiastic users of all things fossil-fuel related and the most likely to complain about the environmental motes in other people’s eyes while ignoring the beams in their own.

If we escape the worst consequences of climate change (big if), it’ll be thanks to the ingenuity of Millennials who are developing novel power solutions (longer lasting batteries, more effective solar cells, etc etc etc).

(I realize this post would be more effective with more links. It would also not exist did I take the time to dig up those links. Climate change is the water we’re swimming in, I ran out of patience for proving how serious it is about 1998 or so. Good thing there are lots of millennials running around who haven’t run out of patience yet.)Report

@davidtc “Sons are the provision of the Lord; the fruit of the womb, His reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are sons born to a man in his youth. Happy is the man who fills his quiver with them; they will not be put to shame when they contend with the enemy in the gate.” Psalms 127:3-5

The Rabbis also taught that the miracle births of Isaac and Samuel are evidence that children are considered a gift from God. Many Hebrew names like Jonathan or Nathan translate as Gift of God.Report

On some Puranic accounts, people don’t necessarily get reincarnated directly after the end of of their previous lives, they may spend some time in heaven or hell to work off their good and bad karma before they are reborn. So, at least some babies did come from heaven.Report

People have to work off *good* karma, so they *must* go to heaven for a bit and…spend karma to get to nothing? Because you can’t go back with good karma, you have to be neutral?

That seems…totally inconsistent with what I understand the whole point of karma to be in Hinduism. I mean, I’m not a follower of Hinduism, so maybe I misunderstand, but that seems really weird. I know different (sects? denominations? I forget the word.) think karma might, or might not, be important in the next life, but I’ve never heard of any one that demands you start at zero.

Although I understand it’s a bit different in Jainism, and karma is more an impurity of the soul. So maybe that’s what you’re talking about, people are maybe supposed to start with no impurities, or at least if they get too many, good *or* bad, they have some taken away.

OTOH, ‘some Puranic accounts’ is probably as ‘official’ a belief as ‘Jewish folk beliefs’ or my ‘Catholic now-heresy’. Just being in some random stories doesn’t really make it ‘officially’ (Whatever that means.) part of the religion.Report

No, they may work off some of their karma if they wish to. So, if you’ve been really bad in this life, you could go to hell to serve your time and in your next life wont be that bad or you could go on to your next life straight away and it is likely to be bad.Report

Jewish folk belief argues that every Jew was present in spirt when the covenant between God and Israel was made at Mt. Sinai. The souls of Jews who haven’t been born yet had to be somewhere. I have nothing on the gentiles though.Report

Jewish folk belief argues that every Jew was present in spirt when the covenant between God and Israel was made at Mt. Sinai.

How does that work with *converts*?

…hey, wait a minute. The covenant between God and Israel was made *on earth*, not in heaven. (A clue is the location ‘Mt. Sinai’, which clearly is an earthly location, being made of Latin characters and not unpronounceable glowing glyphs.)

So that places all the souls of every Jew *on earth* at that time, not in heaven. We don’t know what happened after that. Maybe they just hung around on earth waiting for Jewish babies to climb into. (Not sure how that works, they might be assigned, or perhaps it’s first-come-first-serve.)

The souls of Jews who haven’t been born yet had to be somewhere.

Also, in addition to the idea they were just bumming it on earth since then, that seems to be be very three dimensional thinking to force God into. 😉 Maybe he made them and then sent them forward in time. Or maybe he made them when he needs them and sent then *backwards* in time to be there, and then back forward.

Heh, forget about God creating rocks he can’t lift, the new question is: Can God interact with a soul before than He has even created it?

I have nothing on the gentiles though.

Well, if we’re talking folk beliefs, Christian ‘folk belief’ (Well, Catholic now-heresy.) has souls of babies in Limbo, (Specifically, the Limbo of the Infants.) but that’s *after* death. But there’s no logical reason they couldn’t be there before birth, too.

Although Limbo, oddly, is technically part of hell, not part of heaven.Report

@davidtc, see also The Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 119b: “Rab Judah said in the Rab’s name: What is meant by, Touch not my anointed ones and do my prophets no harm? Touch not my anointed ones refers to school children…Resh Lakish said in the name of R. Judah the Prince: The world endures only for the sake of the breath of school children…Every town where there are no school children shall be destroyed.”

To the Rabbis of the Talmud, school children learning their lessons saved the world from falling into comic apocalypse.Report

I’m not disagreeing that climate change got passed over, but I’m curious about what you think the options were in the 80s and 90s. What could we Boomers have done that would change the outcome enough today?

If you believe, like I do, that from the perspective of energy, the planet’s carrying capacity for a contemporary developed-country middle-class lifestyle, without cooking the planet, is about 1.5B, there were no politically feasible choices. We were already closing in on a billion middle-class people, but today’s 7.5B total population was already baked in (look at some of the predictions for 2020 made back then). Drastic reductions in lifestyles in the developed countries simply weren’t going to happen. Nor was anyone willing to tell the developing and undeveloped countries, “Sorry, you don’t get to be rich or even middle class,” and enforce it. Solar and wind in today’s form weren’t available (there’s been a lot of technology happen since then). Nuclear was looking very, very risky.

That’s short hand for “most people weren’t willing to believe these problems and take them seriously.”

So your whole response is basically a tautology I think?

Because if most adult people, particularly those who wielded the bulk of consumer power (Boomers), had taken them seriously, they would have made the kinds of changes Millennials are making today. Simple things like “live near where you work” and “don’t participate in white flight”, off the top of my head.

But it’s a false scenario anyway because the issues are not what individual people did, it’s what people put pressure on institutions and large corporations to do (and what individuals within those entities are willing to do).

Not prioritizing growth over environmental impact and CO2 production, basically. Acting in overall best interest rather than consumer best interest. Not driving “middle-class lifestyle” up and up and up and up so that people “need” 3 cars, etc etc etc.

One or 40 boomers who got it – hell, a million boomers who got it – which is easily less than there actually were … not much change. But when you’re talking generalizations like this, you’re talking dozens of millions of people. And if even HALF that many people had decided to not be in denial about what was going to be on their grandchildren or great-grandchildren’s plates…Report

Maybe, maybe not. But we do have very different views for who in the US should get the blame for various things. White flight was the Boomer’s (my) parents. So was dismantling the last of the mass transit in smaller cities. By the time boomers began really coming of age — 1970 or thereabouts — their parents were in the process of pulling up the last of the ladders by passing laws that penned in the core urban cities (eg, Colorado’s Poundstone Amendment that said Denver, and Denver Public Schools in particular, couldn’t reach across county lines).

I’m seven years back from the leading edge of the Boomers, and it was all a done deal by the time I got out of college. Every place I interviewed was out in the suburbs. I wasn’t picking places based on that, that’s just where the kinds of jobs I had trained for were located. To generalize too much, by that time urban cores were either dangerous or too pricey for many employers. Living “close to work” meant living in the ‘burbs.

We should have made the ‘burbs more efficient. We should have started rebuilding transit sooner. To assert that we should have reversed the trend to Garreau’s “edge cities” is asking an awful lot.Report

“To assert that we should have reversed the trend to Garreau’s “edge cities” is asking an awful lot.”

Given that Boomers, unlike their parents, had the opportunity to know it was necessary, and given the consequences, and given that I’ve chosen, myself, to live in a downtown that’s a grocery desert after being spoiled in the 90s by Montreal’s fruit stores on every corner, it doesn’t seem like that much to me. Maybe you can only live near one person’s job. Maybe you are stuck in a suburb because that’s where your sorts of jobs are. The stakes were already known to be that high in the 80s and 90s, if people didn’t have their blinders on. I know because I was studying the info and trying to educate the grown-ups, painstakingly.

I also think (would be happy to learn I’m wrong) that while white flight started in the previous generation, it did not slow AT ALL in the Boomer generation. And given Boomer ideals, and population power, it should have.Report

I believe firmly that we are on the same side. But if it has to be a personal pissing contest…

I spent the 20 best years of my professional career fighting every day to get a bunch of Fortune 500 companies to deploy technology that would enable millions of people to drive or fly zero miles to work or class one or more days each week. Technology that would let me discuss my research problem with a real librarian instead of a search engine. That would make it trivial (and dirt cheap) for me to talk to my Mom with voice and video, and have my sister or granddaughter drop in on the conversation from time to time. It was lonely, and it was discouraging, and eventually, a bunch of snot-nosed post-Boomer managers told me that my vision was wrong, and my services were no longer needed.Report

Yeah, it’s not YOU as a person I’m talking about. It’s “Boomers” as a social group.

i assumed we were talking about the social group since that was the point of my ’40 million people are not enough’ thing.

I actually prefer not to talk about people in terms of social groups at all, for the very reason that it’s hard not to take it personally in any direction.

But if people insist on seeing “calling out lack of collective action” as “personal attack” … how do you ever call out lack of collective action? and if you can’t acknowledge historical mistakes, are you doomed to repeat them?Report

To echo Chip’s point, scientists and regulators and politicians got together to analyze serious problems and implemented serious solutions.

(overpopulation may still be a problem, though. this climate change thing is looking like a hard problem, apparently only solvable through crop failure -> starvation -> war -> catastrophic war -> population reduced to new carrying capacity. As I’m in my 50s, I expect to die of old age before things get really bad here in the USA. But anyone under, say, 25 will likely see a very different planet by the end of their life span.)

ETA: This was written before Maribou posted. Apologies for a largely duplicate comment.Report

“[Overpopulation is] also hugely hard to do anything about and always has been.”

According to the best-case predictions of “The Population Bomb” we would have hit about seventeen billion people in the late Nineties, at which point resource-control wars would break out in Southeast Asia and kill half the planet. (Worst-case scenario was that everyone would die from nuclear war in the early Nineties.) Even the more optimistic predictions put us at twelve to fourteen by now. As it is we’ve barely hit the halfway mark on seven billion, and it’s expected that we won’t even hit double digits until about a century after Ehrlich scared us all with tales of brown hordes.Report

A lot of the early environmental movement was wrong. Just simply wrongheaded, driven by hysteria, youthful ignorance and lack of perspective, self-aggrandizing vanity and love of theatrics.

In other words, the same criticisms being leveled at millennials today, which could just as easily have and were said about the anti-apartheid protestors, feminists, and “gay lib” activists.

These criticisms were true, and accurate in many cases.

But what was overlooked was that alongside the silly protesters, there were serious sober activists who didn’t need the spotlight, and didn’t grow tired when the work got tedious and difficult, and who were able to forge alliances and make compromises and actually get things done, like removing lead from gasoline, and mandating catalytic converters, and vapor recovery nozzles.

And the result is that the air quality in Los Angeles has gone from unhealthful most of the time to extremely clear today; I doubt any Millennial has ever had to play indoors due to a smog attack, and may not even know what the word means.

I think we are probably making the same mistake today, focusing on the silly adolescents in safe spaces, and not noticing the other activists actually, quietly, doing the hard work of changing society.Report

In college in the late ’80s, I hated environmentalists. The face of the movement was everything you say and more. There was an underswell of something environmentalism can never countenance – anti-intellectualism. Environmentalism must always be informed by science because that is the fundamental on which it must be built. It can never succumb to woo, and that’s where it was for big parts of that decade…

Then, in the 90s, I talked with actual scientists. And, despite my completely justified feelings – which are not unjustified even today, I might add – they convinced me, using actual evidence. Which is why I don’t have any patience for people who don’t do the same.Report

A lot of the early environmental movement was wrong. Just simply wrongheaded, driven by hysteria, youthful ignorance and lack of perspective, self-aggrandizing vanity and love of theatrics.

Insert my rant here about how we spent a hell of a lot of resources on keeping harmless paper and glass and aluminum out of landfills (Two of those, paper and glass, are literally impossible to run out of.), when we could have instead spent those resources keeping lead and mercury and americium and lithium and antibiotics and the list of chemicals that will be in our water forever goes on and on…out of landfills. Stop training kids to separate out paper, train them to separate out *batteries*, you idiots. You guys have probably read my rant on that by now, so I will spare you.

And don’t get me started on nuclear power, because we should be in the middle of talking about slowing shuttering (now that we have somewhat workable solar), as they get outdated, the massive amount of nuclear power plants we built in the 80s instead of continuing to burn coal and oil. Oops! We forgot to to build those! We’ve been burning coal and oil the entire damn time, like morons, because we all knew, uh, solar was better than nuclear. (Huh?)

I think we are probably making the same mistake today, focusing on the silly adolescents in safe spaces, and not noticing the other activists actually, quietly, doing the hard work of changing society.

That’s not a mistake. A mistake would be if we’re doing it *accidentally*.

It’s possible to argue that a lot of what happened with the environmental movement was ‘mistakes’, as in, we actually wanted to do things, but did the wrong thing. But that was after the movement *won*.

But focusing on the crazies has always been a very good way to stop or slow social movements, and that’s what’s happening with the changes originating on colleges.

Because, with the slightest bit of reflection, it becomes clear that *most* of what people are talking about is real to some extent, and probably should have something done about it.Report

“A lot of the early environmental movement was wrong. Just simply wrongheaded, driven by hysteria, youthful ignorance and lack of perspective, self-aggrandizing vanity and love of theatrics.”

But the fact is that the even if the antic were offputting, the issues of the early environmental movement were correct: CFCs were destroying the ozone layer, acid rain was damaging forests, rivers were dying or dead, desertification was expanding, biodiversity is diminishing, antibiotics foster the evolution of superbugs, pesticides and fertilizers run in the water and into our bodies, DDT was killing the top of food chain birds, etc., etc., etc.

We have now a grasp on some of those issues, the ozone layer is recovering, acid rain is not a major issue, fish swim in the Thames again, the bald eagles are not dying anymore. Other issues are still work in progress.

It’s a counterfactual, and thus I cannot demonstrate it, but I believe that without the hysterics in the background, the serious sober activists would not have received the political support they got to do things like ban CFCs or force power plants to abate SOx/NOx and control acid rain. The hysterics were able to communicate to the mushy middle voter not only that things were bad, but that things could be substantially improved if we were willing as a society to pay for the corrections. And then they voted for the corrections to be implemented.Report

It’s still dogging the environmental movement to this day, whether by driving activists down ridiculous blind alleys like being “anti-GMO”, or the way environmentalists still tend to be reflexively opposed to nuclear power, even though the risks are pretty small when stacked up against the risk of climate change (or even when stacked up against the risk of burning coal for electricity without considering climate change).

Of course, you see it all over, from every angle. It’s annoying.Report

Yep. My FB feed has a few ‘environmentalists’, and it’s so hard to take them seriously, when they post one thing about the dangers of fossil fuels & climate change, and then the next post is rabid anti-gmo, complete with claims about BigPharma using GMOs to feed us illness so they can sell drugs (usually then followed by something about water having ‘memory’).

And to add some irony, they then make fun of the contrails people, or 9/11 truthers, etc.Report

I’m not opposed to nuclear energy. I am annoyed that hysteria has forced the industry to stagnate onto a single mode of extracting energy from fission reactions, a mode that happens to have all sort of challenges, and meeting those challenges inflates the cost of safe operation considerably.

I mean, it’s great that the world now has enough installed solar & wind generating capacity to equal coal, but had nuclear hysteria not happened, we may have been able to stop burning coal decades ago, instead of just thinking about getting around to it now.Report

It’s not clear to me it’s less neglected from the ledger than the externalities associated with the resource extraction necessary for manufacturing solar panels.

I’d be much more comfortable about general environmentalist opposition to nuclear power if it were more frequently framed in terms of carefully and consistently accounting for all the costs, risks and externalities associated with various power generation technologies and showing that nuclear power is sufficiently bad, FSVO “sufficient”, that we shouldn’t use it.

Unfortunately, that’s usually not what happens, and often it’s not what happens in a way that leads to environmentalists effectively defending coal, which, like, what?Report

There’s a lot of unaccounted for externalities in power generation. I won’t ask about PVs because I don’t know much about it, but I can talk about the rest.

We have the tools, if not the will, to get a good handle at what the externalities of thermal power air pollution, of large dam and run of river hydro power, and of wind power are. I haven’t seen anywhere near as good an estimate of the externalities of nuclear powerReport

I think there is a line (albeit a fizzy one) between outrage and hysteria. Trayvon was clearly outrage (people were not, for instance, claiming that the lack of investigation was because Zimmerman was a member of the Illuminati).

Why would the refineries care about leaded fuel? Also, the oil industry was labeling lead fears as hysteria long before the EPA got involved, despite very clear evidence that it was toxic. I’m sensing a pattern with that industry…Report

This is the flip side of the problem with hysteria: a lot of political actors will label pretty much anything hysteria in order to discredit their opposition. Sometimes they’ll do that and attempt to foment their own sort of hysteria at the same time.

It’s annoying. Like many annoying things in life, though, it doesn’t seem like there’s a great alternative.Report

They cared because they had spent hundreds of millions building gasoline additive units that suddenly became obsolete, while they were forced to spend hundreds of millions to build new additive facilities that would not be reimbursed through higher gasoline prices (unlike scrubbers in power plants that could be passed on to customers in the tariff)

One of my old jobs was working for the design and construction of an MTBE (a gasoline additive that replaced lead) plant. In the early 90s the tab was about 300 millions.

MTBE was banned in the USA as a gasoline additive not 10 years later. Another investment down the drain.Report

“I sense a pattern with that industry” makes me think of the weird media bias most people have. They’ll read a story about something they know quite a bit about (perhaps they were involved, or it’s their field of expertise, etc) and say “They didn’t get anything right!” and then turn to another article outside their own personal experience and say “That sounds right” — they don’t extend their experiences logically, into the notion that reporting on fields that require heavy knowledge or expertise is often…really bad, because reporters lack the knowledge and expertise to cut through the BS and the flack.

It’s not just the oil industry — which cheerfully lied about lead, and CO2 it turns out, to profit it’s bottom line. Tobacco did it to, quite happily. Name a pharmaceutical company, and they’ve got a drug that costs 100x as much and, at most, works just as well as another….

And oh god, moving into historical examples….

In the pursuit of profit, there are very, very few things industries won’t do in the name of higher profits, even if such things are long-term stupid. They’ll happily take short-term profits now, because the fallout will happen to someone else.

Which is why, by and large, I’m suspicious of nuke plants. I don’t like the design history (derived from naval designs, with the ready access to seawater, the localized failure, and the compact, high-energy designs), I don’t like the fact that the failure mode is…expensive….and I don’t like the number of things they’ve been caught cutting corners on.

It’s not that I don’t trust commercial nuclear power. I don’t trust the most common designs in the hands of private, profit-seeking concerns.

In the hands of the Navy? Not a problem. In the hands of, oh, Reliant Energy? Less so.

Give me a safer, more sensible design? I’m all ears. Place the development of the reactor, and subsequent maintenance and safety in the hands of non-profit seeking entities with the power and ability to make sure things are well and good? I’m listening.

That’s not because radiation is scary. It’s because I’ve seen a pattern in industry I don’t like the idea of seeing in nuclear reactors.Report

That is the problem. By the time safer, more sensible designs were ready to be pushed to proof of concept & debugging, the word “nuclear” would incite such hysterics from people who had neither the education nor experience to even hope to parse the actual risk.

Because the alternatives for raising octane level were more expensive. It’s like any industry being told that their costs are going to go up. (I recall guest editorials in the Wall Street Journal that the replacements were going be more toxic than lead, but the fishing EPA was too fishing stupid to fishing understand that. Lies, of course.)Report

I’m sure they did. There’s two kinds of expense, of course: the stuff costs more, which you can pass right along, and whatever capital expenses are involved in the changeover, which you can’t, at least not immediately, and which divert capital from where you wanted to invest it.

But I’m not sure what you’re asking: don’t most businesses lobby against new regulations?Report

I can understand what J_A said about large capital investments with the additive equipment. But (and this clearly shows how little I know of the specifics of the refining process), isn’t raising octane just additional refining?

The octane number is just a comparison of how an engine fuel compares with how a mixture of iso-octane and heptane (eight and sever carbon atoms hydrocarbons) would burn. 90 octanes neans it burns just like a 90-10 octane-heptane mixture. You can get octane numbers above 100 if it burns better than pure octane (racing fuels and AV gas are 100 plus octanes)

You get to improve the octane number not just by adding more octane (which is indeed a matter of refining, not that refining is cheap) but you can do it by adding additives like lead tetraetyl, ethanol, or MTBE (ethanol has less energy than gasoline, so ethanol improves the octanes but reduces the energy content by volume).

Though (basic) refining is just (just, hehe) a physical process that separates the different hydrocarbons present in the mixture we call oil, most additives (ethanol being an exception) are petrochemical products that require fairly complex chemical processes to manufacture.Report

So, unleaded is more expensive to produce, which should mean it’s a pass through cost, right? Once you get past any capital investment on new equipment, producing the new formulation just means the price at the pump goes up. So I can understand petro resistance to making the capital investments needed to change the formulation, but not resistance to anything beyond that (which is what Mike was implying, that the resistance was about producing the new formulation long term, not just buying new equipment).Report

Unlike electricity delivery, in which companies are protected by the natural monopoly structure, gasoline production , like Coca Cola, is fully exposed to market pressures.

Phasing out lead, or MTBE, does not mean refiners can automatically pass on the price increase to customers. Additive manufacturers and gasoline makers need to compete, and they do, fiercely. Refining is a very low margin business, and a great way to lose enormous amounts of money.

In reality, the only place you make money in the oil business is in the crude production. All the rest is a really crappy business, requiring enormous investments and subject to both regulatory and market pressures.Report

I think you are letting your engineer grown up mind drive away your political three year old mind (*). You won’t get far this way.

Reasonable people making intelligent reality-based observations, and proposing coherent, value-cost driven solutions, will never, ever, ever, ever, bring political change (and banning CFCs or leaded gasoline is political change). You need the common people to engage, and for that you need noise, and storm, and drang. Lots of it.

The French Revolution wasn’t going anywpwhere until the fishmonger and baker mobs assaulted Versailles. Talk about hysterics.

Yeah, let’s NOT hold up the French Revolution as a positive example of political change through hysterics, ‘K?

As I said to Mike, there is a difference between outrage & hysterics. Kind of like the difference between a bomb and a biological weapon. Both kill, but only one of them is certain to have a very limited area of impact.

ETA: For a more real world example – Outrage helps get us political action, (hopefully) useful regulation, and some enforcement. Hysteria get us firebombed research labs.Report

Not sure why we would want to incentive more three-year-old-mind political thinking as opposed to intelligent reality-based thinking. It may be politically expedient to speak directly to people’s hindbrains to get them to take or demand action on certain issues, but in the long run that is how you end up with Trump and various other populist movements.

If more people had the knowledge and the ability to make fully informed micro-level decisions in the context of true costs and benefits, the less political change we’ll need.Report

PS If anyone is wondering, it was “I’m shocked that YOU didn’t even mention climate change,” given that @holly-whitman has some experience in writing about climate change – she even mentions it in her bio. I know she knows about it so I’m surprised she doesn’t count it into the balance. Is all.Report

That article is a pretty good example of what’s wrong with millennials. Case in point:

Now imagine a similar scenario where you are applying for a job, but the job requires a college degree, but you can’t pay for a college degree without a job so you end up taking out massive loans. Then when you graduate, you still can’t get a job without experience. So you end up in a minimum wage job (or three), making ends meet and barely making your loan payments. You say something like, “the minimum wage needs to be raised, people can’t live like this,” only to receive a barrage of old, crotchety white people yelling at you about how gosh-darn ENTITLED you are, and how THEY got a college education working part time and how it’s your fault for taking out the loans in the first place.

Questioning the efficacy of the minimum wage is gaslighting? Is this really how adults ought to be talking about significant policy issues? The thing that really worries me about millennials is the extent to which their moral and ethical compass is rooted in solipsism.Report

In my day they made foolish entitled kids better. In my day the silly things drank ha’penny small beers and talked intently about things they heard over the Marconi wireless telegraph – things so remote they couldn’t possibly affect their lives, things sometimes two days’ travel by stagecoach away!Report

I don’t know if it’s a good thing, but it’s not clear why it would be an improvement for those adults to pretend that crude idiocy about how entitled they are is actually a serious question about the efficacy of raising the minimum wage. In any event, indulging in that sort of fantasy seems more solipsistic than the alternative.Report

No, old people telling millennials over and over that they can work their way through college on a min wage job because that’s how *they* did it…is gaslighting. Oh, and BTW, why aren’t you buying more houses and moving out of your parent’s house?

Or, at least, it has the *effects* of gaslighting. Gaslighting is insisting to someone that what they are accurately observing is untrue, that their perceptions do not match reality, for the purpose of unmooring their grip on reality.

All that is true, except I’m pretty sure there’s no *malice* there, just utter stupidity by old people who somehow inexplicably have newspaper columns and TV shows.

Whether or not the minimum wage should be raise is another issue entirely, but young people are being repeatedly told their actual observations of reality are not true, which, yes, is basically gaslighting.

And, BTW, they might actually believe raising it is a bad idea if old people would *stop lying to them*.

Right now, it’s clear to them that old people have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about what is possible to do on the min wage, and the price of college, and the job market. It is a pretty good question as to why they’d believe anyone that there are possibly bad effects in raising it.Report

No, old people telling millennials over and over that they can work their way through college on a min wage job because that’s how *they* did it…is gaslighting. Oh, and BTW, why aren’t you buying more houses and moving out of your parent’s house?

Stop and ask yourself who is saying these things? And more importantly, where are they saying them?

Gaslighting is insisting to someone that what they are accurately observing is untrue, that their perceptions do not match reality, for the purpose of unmooring their grip on reality.

There is another term for showing people that their perceptions do not match reality: reality. The answers are right there, but you can’t see them. That’s the problem with solipsism.Report

Stop and ask yourself who is saying these things? And more importantly, where are they saying them?

I really have no idea what sort of goddamn answers you want to those question, or what you think those answer prove.

I already said who and where those things are being said: By old people in the media.

There is another term for showing people that their perceptions do not match reality: reality. The answers are right there, but you can’t see them. That’s the problem with solipsism.

And this is just entirely bullshit from beginning to end.

Firstly, solipsism has fuck all to do with anything being discussed here. Solipsism is an abstract philosophy that no one actually believes.

Secondly, hey, look, it’s apparently *you*. You already knew the answer to your first paragraph! It was you all along! *dramatic chord*

It’s *you* gaslighting millennials by insisting they could, I dunno, magically go to cheaper colleges or rent places that don’t exist so they can afford all that on min wage.

And it’s *you* insisting they’re all solipsists because they keep pointing out that everyone is just making shit up about their economic status. (Hint: Actual solipsists can’t logically complain about other people doing things, which is one the many reasons that actual solipsists don’t exist.)Report

I already said who and where those things are being said: By old people in the media.

And yet, you can’t seem to show them to me.

That should tell you something.

It’s *you* gaslighting millennials by insisting they could, I dunno, magically go to cheaper colleges or rent places that don’t exist so they can afford all that on min wage.

If it makes you feel better to accuse me of some made up pomo/social justice term, have at it. One of the perks of not being a millennial is that I don’t freak out every time someone says something mean about me on the internet.Report

Great. Now read those links and put them into the context of the larger conversation.

Then try googling the terms, “entitled millennial minimum wage” or just “entitled millennial.” You should start to notice a pattern. That this entire conversation is, for lack of a better term, manufactured.Report

@j-r Telling anyone to google anything to get a sense of proportion is fairly pointless because of the filter bubble. (Which I suspect you know, given that you’re arguing for this being another case of a filter bubble, but in case anyone else is interested, Google uses its data on you to show you more of what it thinks you’d rather see.)

If you want to use that as evidence of anything, best to advise them to use anonymous browsing to do it first… #duckduckgo (or whatever). Which is kind of a bummer, because “fishing google it!” just … comes off the tongue better. Maybe eventually Google will die, or just stop bothering with search engines, and then we can reclaim its generic use.

(The worst was when there was a rash of librarians doing this unawares and then PUBLISHING THE RESULTS as if they proved something. Librarians! Garrrrgh! That was back in the late oughts though, and they have since mended their ways. Or at least most of them have.)Report

Oh sure. But in my experience, getting away from Google is a good first step in weakening said filter.

Also, the particular article Bill linked to, despite the arguably clickbaity title, is making some good points in a reasonably organized and articulate fashion. Much like the article above.

Whereas most of the millennial bashing I run across (again, IRL) is more like “Someone cut me off! They must have been texting! Those darn millennials [cue five minute rant lacking in any evidence the perpetrator even was a Millennial] .” or “I was on Facebook and I cannot believe what so and so did! Young people these days! Millennials [cue 5 minute rant]”

Arguably I need a better filter bubble for real life, but other than the occasional irrational outpouring of resentment against 20-somethings, these people are generally wonderful human beings who are a joy to be around.Report

I remember back in ’96 – ’97 when Google was the search engine that nobody wanted to use because it was the crappiest of the bunch. Its only charm was that it didn’t have crap all over the page. Little did we understand that they were gathering information about every click, for the purpose of plastering the page with crap.Report

As for its clinical uses, I’ve had reason to do a lot of research into the ways in which different abusers use gaslighting, and while I would agree that it’s strategic, I think it’s very often (maybe even most often) not a conscious set of choices. The abusers I’ve known / read about who use it most *believe* what they’re saying while they’re saying it, and feel deeply wronged by the abused person’s refusal to agree with their reality. It’s also often a result of projection, where the abuser invests their victims with all the things they themselves are most in denial about feeling guilty about.

I am super-wary of the use of gaslighting as an analogy in general, but I think in this particular case it rings pretty true.

(Born in 1977, bought my first computer in 87 after years of using someone else’s, definitely identify more with GenX than Millennials… heard a description / line-drawing once that GenXers who like computers want to know how they work, Millennials who like them want them to just work, which is a lot more consistently applicable – ie maybe 70 percent – than any other generational generalization I’ve heard.)Report

@maribouFWIW pomo as a term generally describes the 60s-70s rise of postmodernism so his time period was pretty reasonable.

You think by pomo/social justice @j-r merely meant the *time period*? Huh? Why would he have included ‘social justice’ in there, and why would he have called it ‘made up’, if he merely meant ‘Word invented in the 60s’. (Why would anyone run around dating words in speech?)

He clearly didn’t mean ‘a word invented recently’, he meant ‘a word that is some aspect of post-modernism, and thus he can dismiss it’.

As I was pointing out, the *concept* clearly predates post-modernism. And it’s not like the play Gas Light was the invention of the concept, hell, it wasn’t even the first work of fiction to do it. It (Or, rather, the movie made from it) was just a pretty popular movie.

Just because the word happened to be invented during the post-modern era doesn’t make it a post-modern term. That’s like saying that ‘scam’ is a post-modern term, because the word ‘scam’ was invented in the 60s also.

And there is, of course, the further question of why something being a post-modern term means it’s ‘made up’ in the first place! ‘Teenybopper’ is a word invented in the 60s that could count as a post-modern term, as it describes something that happened within post-modern culture…but the girls described by that *actually existed*. It’s not a useless nonsense word just because it has post-modern roots.

“He’s ‘scamming’ people?! Well, you can believe whatever made up pomo/social justice term you want, but I’m going to help this Nigerian prince!”

I am super-wary of the use of gaslighting as an analogy in general, but I think in this particular case it rings pretty true.

It’s basically micro-gaslighting, by analogy with micro-aggression. It’s probably not any sort of malicious intent, or not even the ‘controlling but not trying to be malicious but really is’ that a lot of the abuse probably is classified under. And none of it is bad by itself, and any single instance could be dismissed by the victim as ‘that guy is an idiot and doesn’t know what he is talking about’…but it happening constantly creates a mist of unreality.

There is a reason millennials have rather high levels of stress related mental problems like anxiety, and it’s not just because they have to deal with a lot…they also have to deal with society telling them that all this stuff is easy and they should man up and, uh, work higher paying jobs that they can’t get, and buy houses they can’t afford.

At some point doubt starts creeping in and people ask themselves ‘Maybe I’m just doing this adult thing wrong?’Report

@davidtc I dunno, when I hear people go off on angry spittle-flecked rants about “Millennials” it doesn’t feel particularly “micro” to me. It feels really really familiar (and triggers the same protective/”look over here and yell at me instead!” impulses toward my youngest sibling and other millennials I know that actual, full-on, familial gaslighting did when I was a teenager.)Report

@maribouI dunno, when I hear people go off on angry spittle-flecked rants about “Millennials” it doesn’t feel particularly “micro” to me.

Yeah, I was talking more about the general background noise about millennials, newspaper articles and Facebook memes and stuff.

There are, indeed, a bunch of people that *angry* and angry in person, and that’s probably full-on gaslighting. Which sorta shows there’s a fine line between gaslighting and `splaining.

It’s actually a bit weird, thinking about. Older generations always get annoyed at younger ones, but it’s usually based in either actual facts (They like listening to music I don’t like!), or what the *younger* generation accepts as facts even if not actually true. (They’re having more sex!)

I can’t really think of things that previous ‘younger generations’ were accused of that were both untrue, and not lies that generation was *itself* telling.

Well, beyond the ‘they are lazy and disrespectful’, but that’s always there. But this ‘I will treat their financial difficulties as if those are imaginary and being invented by them.’ is something new.Report

Well, it is possible for a person to think he is in more financial difficulty than he really is. If I have expensive tastes and am bad at delaying gratification, then I might think that I’m not earning enough to live even when I in fact am. Lived experience is one of those things which people want to do far more epistemic work than it can do. In order for denying people’s “lived experience” to be a mistake, lived experience must be the kind of incorrigible process whereby complex social facts are directly perceived. If instead, the content delivered by lived experience is heavily conditioned by the background assumptions and theories a person has, and if those assumptions are bad assumptions, then pointing this out isn’t a mistake and is just like any other propositional disagreement. So, if I had bad assumptions, what I experience as difficulty making ends meet could really be me being bad at managing my money. I’m going to have to go beyond just stating what my experience is to settle the question.Report

Murali, that comment is just dumb. And pretty much a textbook justification for textbook splaining.

You stand there and claim that someone might be mistaken about *their own* situation, and use that almost-nonsensical and extremely-rare hypothetical situation to justify *someone writing a newspaper article that generalizes about all people of a certain age*.

Bull. Shit. None of the people complaining about millennials have operated any sort of detailed study of all millennial financial situations what would allow them to know any of this at all. There is absolutely no evidence that they have figured it out better than the group of people they are complaining about.

In addition, what you are hypothesizing *can’t even explain* most of the common complaints about. So millennials think they’re poor because they’re spending so much money…so can’t move out of their parents house? I suppose they’re spending all they money on luxury cruises or something, and are totally baffled as to why they can’t afford an apartment?

Likewise, they’re complaining they can’t find jobs besides min wage because…they aren’t aware that min wage is more than enough to live off of if they’d stop buying solid gold clothing?

One thing that’s funny about this is that the term “trolling” has become so debased by misuse that people had to invent a new term, “gaslighting”, to denote the behavior that we used to call “trolling”.Report

“Gaslighting” is a useful term for X telling Y that Y isn’t experiencing what, in fact, Y is experiencing. We could use a similar term for X getting Y worked up over experiences that Y is not, in fact, having. Any suggestions?Report

I dunno. I’m still trying to differentiate Trumpian Behavior* from gaslighting.

*Like, you know, the bits where he says “Wrong” over things we all saw him do. Like there’s not just tape of him doing it, which has been shown over and over, but he’s been actually shown the tape — he knows we know he’s lying, but does it anyways, and seems to somehow believe it.

It’s a rewriting of personal history so brazen as to be well into pathological.Report

@j-r FWIW I hear this from people older than me IN PERSON all the gorram time. (As a GenXer who supervises Millennials, they assume I will be sympathetic to their concerns. And since I was raised polite and most of them are relatives or acquaintances or demographically far outnumber me in whatever context, I keep my mouth shut and they just keep complaining.) I know a lot more Boomers than any other age group, because family, etc. And I hear bitching about 20somethings (not teenagers! not kids! specifically 20somethings! whom many of them don’t even KNOW any 20 somethings closely) at least once a month.

I don’t think there are all that many articles written about it online, because, well, Boomers who are upset about Young People These Days are a lot less likely to write about it online in viral formats than Young People who are upset about being upset about. Because Boomers (as a whole), particularly the ones who find Millennials tiresome, are, IME, not all that enthused about technology, and especially social media, either.

But dear god will they not shut up about it.

It’s not especially new, either, it was a favorite topic among the Pronouncers in my community band (where the median age was maybe 60 or so) ten years ago. (Granted they were also talking about “Millennials” when they meant “early 20 somethings”. The generational definition seems to have spread out over the last decade.)

I mean, I was a young, fervent, rebellious, headshaven GenXer at a time when old people loved nothing more to complain about Young People These Days (as they do) and yet I heard SOOOOOOOOOOOO much less complaining than I do now.

Maybe working for a college just marks me out as an appropriate person to complain to or something. But the complainers are definitely out there.Report

Conservatism is not “family values” and it has nothing to do with religion — it is an aversion to progress itself.

C’mon, this is just being abusive

I need someone to tell me what conservativism is. I used to think that I knew, but a large number of self-identified conservatives are now supporting a candidate that bears no resemblance whatsoever to any of their formerly held important principles except one.

I have tried to get people to explain to me how to get to there from here but I haven’t seen an argument that can bridge the gap.Report

Hillary believes in a liberal internationalist foreign policy, a moderately expanded welfare state, expansion of minority rights, and free trade with protections for workers who lose their jobs. Sure sounds like the Democratic Party to me.Report

Worse than Obama. She’s already said she’ll work to bring back all kinds of gun control, even supporting Australia’s total ban, so a SC nominate reflecting that is to be expected. It just depends upon how much the Congress supports her. But I’d expect, at a minimum, her admin to continue Operation Choke Point or something similar.Report

Frankly, I don’t need to show a deviance near Trumps from the Republican’s positions. Pat said “I used to think that I knew (what conservatism was), but a large number of self-identified conservatives are now supporting a candidate that bears no resemblance whatsoever to any of their formerly held important principles except one.”

I said essentially that the also the case with HRC.

1) Morat already stated that HRC is more hawkish than the mainstream liberals. 2) Her position on trade seems to be exactly the same as Trumps (against the TPP) regardless of the reasons-and Dems have been supporters of past free trade deals while their trade union supporters haven’t, ie voting more in line with Repubs in this area) 3) Same with Iran. 2008 Favored no dialogue, now supports the current deal. 4) She apparently in agreement with Trump / some republicans on money in politics, wanting to undo Citizens United.

So a “liberal” is very hawkish, agrees with an alleged racist, misogynist populist on several issues, and has changed positions numerous times on various issues, you’ll understand how people could be confused yes?Report

a large number of self-identified conservatives are now supporting a candidate that bears no resemblance whatsoever to any of their formerly held important principles except one.

I’m sorry, Damon, but most of your points are just nonsense.

1) Morat already stated that HRC is more hawkish than the mainstream liberals.

HRC is more hawkish than her supporters, but pretty much exactly has hawkish as the Democratic party has always been.

2) Her position on trade seems to be exactly the same as Trumps (against the TPP) regardless of the reasons-and Dems have been supporters of past free trade deals while their trade union supporters haven’t, ie voting more in line with Repubs in this area)

In what universe were the Republicans anti-free trade?

However, yes, she has broken with Democratic orthodoxy on this. You found one, congrats.

3) Same with Iran. 2008 Favored no dialogue, now supports the current deal.

Erm, no. She did not favor ‘no diaglogue’. She was against the Iran deal at first, and now has accepted it but indicated she does not trust them to keep it.

But, again, what does this have to do with HRC *not supporting formerly held important Democratic important principles*?

Your argument appears to be that she changed her mind *from* not supporting something the *Democratic president* wanted, to, somewhat, supporting it, which means, if anything, she has moved *into* Democratic orthodoxy (If we accept Obama as Democratic orthodoxy), not away from it.

4) She apparently in agreement with Trump / some republicans on money in politics, wanting to undo Citizens United.

Which is, very obviously, what the *Democrats* have wanted for years. The Democrats have never liked Citizens United! The fact the Republicans have changed their position on it (Now that it has backfired horribly on them) does not mean the Democrats need to. (I know that’s how the *Republicans* think it works, but it’s not how it works for the Democrats.)

So, of your list of examples, only one of them indicates HRC shifting *away* from Democratic orthodoxy: That she is against signing every single trade deal possible.

And that, as a position of Democratic orthodoxy, has *utterly infuriated a vast majority of Democratic voters* for *decades*. It’s considered centrist bullshit that no one actually liked

It’s not surprising that no one on the left sees that as a ‘problem’, or as a repudiation of Democratic values.Report

DavidTC: Your argument appears to be that she changed her mind *from* not supporting something the *Democratic president* wanted, to, somewhat, supporting it, which means, if anything, she has moved *into* Democratic orthodoxy (If we accept Obama as Democratic orthodoxy), not away from it.

Also too:

“What should we do about our nuclear deal with Iran?” was a question that would have made no sense in 2008 because we didn’t have a nuclear deal with Iran.

“Should we sit down to negotiate with Iran without preconditions?” is a question that makes no sense now, because we’ve already negotiated an arrangement with them!Report

Re 1: liberalism-as-practiced-by-politicians often has this problem, because politicians hated being attacked from the right as soft on crime for so long. I wish it weren’t so, but it’s hardly a crazy departure from liberal norms.

Re 2: Trade agreements have tiny economic impacts, despite all the attention they’ve gotten this cycle. And, you’ll recall, she flipped on TPP when attacked from the left by Bernie, so I’m not sure why that flip makes her less liberal.

Re 3: Again, there’s nothing more liberal than non-proliferation deals (which the GOP seems resolutely and stupidly opposed to in every specific case). Why does her becoming more liberal signify that she isn’t one?

Re 4: Liberals have ALWAYS been for campaign finance reform. Citizens United the entity was running attack ads on HILLARY. That Trump sometimes agrees does not make her consistent position non-liberal.

All told, Hillary is an Obama-esque liberal on the policies without the soaring rhetoric but with better coalition-building instincts. She’s also a little bit more hawkish than he was. That’s nothing at all like Trump getting the evangelicals to decide that personal values don’t matter for politicians, after that was their whole entire argument for twenty years.Report

Yeah, people forget Obama said he was against “stupid wars” and campaigned on a surge in Afghanistan. If Obama’s right in the middle when it comes to Democratic foreign policy, Hillary’s a tick or maybe a tick and a half more hawkish than Obama.Report

nevermoor, Hillary wants to take a rusty knife and stab it through the heart of the Left. And then start a trollish flamewar about slavery reparations in the fucking US Senate. (this is part of an ongoing attempt to Astroturf a Race War)

So, um, yeah, the batshit crazy lady who screams at walls rather than campaigning — I dunno, I’m not sure she can be considered to have concrete positions that she’s likely to keep later. Well, other than the promises she’s made to people Bigger Than You Or Me.

To take a stab at your implicit question, I see different kinds of attitudes that I would describe as “conservative.” These can mix and mingle with each other (they’re not mutually exclusive), but adhering to one type of attitude doesn’t necessitate adhering to any of the others:

1. Burkean conservatism: A questioning of the notion that any one definition or set of definitions of “progress” is necessarily good and needs to be questioned or slowed down.

2. Chamber of Commerce conservatism: Belief in the goodness of a unit of interest called “community.” That community is envisaged usually along a geographically delimited area, such as neighborhood, town, city, or other type of locality. And within that community there resides a hierarchy that is essentially good, even if it has some bad points to it, and that hierarchy is usually defined along the interests of the local entrepreneurial class. It’s ambivalent about large-scale corporate dominance in the locality but is very boosterish when it comes to promoting the locality’s business interests.

3. Family values conservatism: A belief in the family as a basic unit of interest that the state ought to support and enforce, and in the process of supporting, define in some way. The resulting definition may fall along lines that are imagined to be “traditionalist” but that evolve with time and vary over place: extended family; nuclear family; “man and woman” marriages; “person and person” (ssm or opposite sex) marriages.

4. Religious conservatism. Religion, often but not always centered on a church or alliance of churches, is seen as a basic unit of interest. Adherents to this type of conservatism believe that the state ought to support or enforce certain elements of right and wrong that are formed by that religion.

5. Libertarian conservatism. The autonomy of the adult individual is the chief unit of interest and state impositions on that autonomy merit heightened scrutiny.

6. Corporate conservatism. An economy that fosters the health of large-scale corporations is believed to be inherently on the right track and while such corporations need to be regulated, the health of corporate capitalism itself needs to be fostered by the state. Sometimes this view is derided as “neo-liberalism,” even though I’m inclined to define that term differently.

7. Nationalist conservatism. The nation is imagined as a basic unit of interest and “its” values need to be fostered and validated and adhered to. What constitutes “the nation” may be in dispute. The “nation” may be imagined in terms of a democratic yeoman citizenry, in terms of a de facto race-specific criteria for membership, in terms of any other marker.

8. Self- or other-identified conservatism. Anyone who chooses to call themselves “conservative” or anyone who is regarded as “conservative.” Whatever such people do, this counts as “conservatism.”

You might be able to think of more or you might consolidate some of the above into some type (e.g., “family values” and “religion” into something called “social conservatism). All of these can be carried to extremes or act as attitudes of convenience. E.g., in no. 7 I alluded to but did not expressly mention white supremacism and xenophobia and Islamaphobia, but at the same time I’ll also mention more accepting versions, such as “salad bowl” or “melting pot” versions of “racial ethnic” nationalism. By “more accepting” I don’t mean “perfectly accepting.” Melting-pot nationalism, for example, overrides ethnic differences.

My problem with Holly’s statement, and why I agree with Murali’s critique (though I’m not sure I’d call her statement “abusive”), is that she labels an entire trend as if it’s indisputably bad and as if what she believes in is indisputably good.Report

How many of these strains of conservatism can be reconciled with a Trump vote?

I only really see #7, and have a hard time believing this is what’s motivating 80% of republicans to vote for Trump.

Also, is this list intending to deny racist conservatism (“We want a return to the days when black folks knew their place and my gender/skin color made me better than them”)? If so, is that because you think it’s a liberal invention? For some other reason?Report

How many of these strains of conservatism can be reconciled with a Trump vote?

Probably all, none, some, and others I didn’t mention, depending on the person. But the one most reconcileable with a Trump vote is probably no. 8, with (as you say) no. 7. As for what’s motivating 80% of republicans to vote for Trump. I don’t know.

Also, is this list intending to deny racist conservatism (“We want a return to the days when black folks knew their place and my gender/skin color made me better than them”)? If so, is that because you think it’s a liberal invention? For some other reason?

No and no to the first two questions. My number 7 and, implicitly, my number 8 are trying to get at that.

To your third question, I’m not trying to deny it, so there’s not a “reason” I’m trying to deny it. I admit that it’s there, though perhaps I should have been clearer. But as I also said, you (the generic “you” who reads the comment, not you or necessarily Pat) can think of some other brands of “conservatism.”

One thing I do deny is that racism is the sum total of how we should define conservatism in this country. Somebody can adopt some form(s) of conservatism and not be racist or more likely, some form(s) of conservatism with an icky admixture of racism that’s not always easy to tease out.

If we’re focusing on Trump and “Trumpism,” I’m having a hard time distinguishing it from racism. So if you’re equating Trump and Trumpism to racism or to white supremacism, I’m more and more in agreement with you. Whether that extends to all who will vote for him? I’d say yes it does and no it doesn’t. Yes it does because the white supremacism and violent sexism he has both encouraged and refused to denounce means that for someone who votes for him, those issues are at the very least less pressing than other issues and at most are just examples of those voters’ underlying racism.

What I was pushing back against in that comment, though, was the notion that there was this thing called conservatism and it’s bad because it is totally against “progress.”Report

On a tangential note, I must have blinked at some point and missed the moment when the stereotype of Baby Boomers changed from commie flower children to warmongering capitalists. When did that happen?Report

From August 2018 through February 2019, AVENATTI defrauded a client (“Victim-1”) by diverting money owed to Victim-1 to AVENATTI’s control and use. After assisting Victim-1 in securing a book contract, AVENATTI allegedly stole a significant portion of Victim-1’s advance on that contract. He did so by, among other things, sending a fraudulent and unauthorized letter purporting to contain Victim-1’s signature to Victim-1’s literary agent, which instructed the agent to send payments not to Victim-1 but to a bank account controlled by AVENATTI. As alleged, Victim-1 had not signed or authorized the letter, and did not even know of its existence.

Specifically, prior to Victim-1’s literary agent wiring the second of four installment payments due to Victim-1 as part of the book advance, AVENATTI sent a letter to Victim-1’s literary agent purportedly signed by Victim-1 that instructed the literary agent to send all future payments to a client trust account in Victim-1’s name and controlled by AVENATTI. The literary agent then wired $148,750 to the account, which AVENATTI promptly began spending for his own purposes, including on airfare, hotels, car services, restaurants and meal delivery, online retailers, payroll for his law firm and another business he owned, and insurance. When Victim-1 began inquiring of AVENATTI as to why Victim-1 had not received the second installment, AVENATTI lied to Victim-1, telling Victim-1 that he was still attempting to obtain the payment from Victim-1’s publisher. Approximately one month after diverting the payment, AVENATTI used funds recently received from another source to pay $148,750 to Victim-1, so that Victim-1 would not realize that AVENATTI had previously taken and used Victim-1’s money.

Approximately one week later, pursuant to AVENATTI’s earlier fraudulent instructions, the literary agent sent another payment of $148,750 of Victim-1’s book advance to the client account controlled by AVENATTI. AVENATTI promptly began spending the money for his own purposes, including to make payments to individuals with whom AVENATTI had a personal relationship, to make a monthly lease payment on a luxury automobile, and to pay for airfare, dry cleaning, hotels, restaurants and meals, payroll, and insurance costs. Moreover, to conceal his scheme, and despite repeated requests to AVENATTI, as Victim-1’s lawyer, for assistance in obtaining the book payment that Victim-1 believed was missing, AVENATTI led Victim-1 to believe that Victim-1’s publisher was refusing to make the payment to the literary agent, when, as AVENATTI knew, the publisher had made the payment to the literary agent, who had then sent the money to AVENATTI pursuant to AVENATTI’s fraudulent instructions.

Here are my principal conclusions:1. Attorney General Barr has deliberately misrepresented Mueller’s report.2. President Trump has engaged in impeachable conduct.3. Partisanship has eroded our system of checks and balances.4. Few members of Congress have read the report.

Rep. Justin Amash, a critic of President Trump who entertained a run against him in 2020, became the first Republican congressman to say the president “engaged in impeachable conduct.”

The Michigan lawmaker, often the lone Trump dissenter on his side of the aisle, shared his conclusions in a lengthy Twitter thread after reviewing the full special counsel report.

Amash wrote that after reading the 448-page report, he’d concluded that not only did Robert S. Mueller’s team show Trump attempting to obstruct justice, but that Attorney General William Barr had “deliberately misrepresented” the findings and that few members of Congress had even read it. “Contrary to Barr’s portrayal, Mueller’s report reveals that President Trump engaged in specific actions and a pattern of behavior that meet the threshold for impeachment,” Amash wrote.

The White House did not immediately respond to request for comment.

The president often says the report found “no collusion, no obstruction,” though neither is true. Mueller did not establish a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, which did interfere in the 2016 election. He did not rule on the obstruction of justice question, saying it was something Congress should determine.

Amash, who was first elected to Congress in 2010, declined on Sunday to rule out a possible 2020 presidential run as a Libertarian candidate.

"Well, I would never rule anything out. That's not on my radar right now," he said of a 2020 bid to Tapper. "But I think that it is important that we have someone in there who is presenting a vision for America that is different from what these two parties are presenting."

Amash told Tapper he believes there is a "wild amount of partisan rhetoric on both sides" and that "Congress is totally broken."

"I think that we need to return to basic American principles, talk about what we have in common as a people -- because I believe we have a lot in common as Americans -- and try to move forward together, rather than fighting each other all the time," Amash said.

Question remains, is Justin Amash going to join any Democrat effort to curtail the president, or is he using this as prelude to something else -- such as his own run for the White House? Drama.

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Elizabeth Warren Is Rooting for Daenerys Targaryen in ‘Game of Thrones’

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is a Game of Thrones fan, and her favorite character is, perhaps unsurprisingly, Daenerys “Stormborn” Targaryen, who Warren says, “has been my favorite from the first moment she walked through fire.” We learned this in a column Warren wrote for The Cut published Sunday evening.

In the piece, Warren outlines her reasons for her fandom. Daenerys is fair, she fights for the people, and she wants to end slavery. But in talking about Daenerys, Warren can also, subtly, talk about herself. Like the paragraph below, in which she describes the Dragon Queen—or is she describing herself?

“This is a revolutionary idea, in Westeros or anywhere else. A queen who declares that she doesn’t serve the interests of the rich and powerful? A ruler who doesn’t want to control the political system but to break the system as it is known? It’s no wonder that the people she meets in Westeros are skeptical. Skeptical, because they’ve seen another kind of woman on the Iron Throne: the villain we love to hate, Queen Cersei of Casterly Rock.”

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If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well It were done quickly: if the assassination Could trammel up the consequence, and catch With his surcease success; that but this blow Might be the be-all and the end-all here, But here, upon this bank and shoal of time, We'ld jump the life to come. But [...]